My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.
Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn't get her boot out. I can't remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.
Couple of years ago, I walked through a forest somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands, called the Waterloopbos, and I came across a blocked off area with quicksand warnings.
I kinda wish I had lost my shoes there, because the shoes I was wearing weren't good for forest walking.
That was the first and so far only time I had seen quicksand in my 44 years of existing on this blue marble.
Reading all these adventure books and comics made me really fear quicksand as a child... I was living in East Berlins suburbs. The most comparable thing to quicksand would have been a mud puddle!
When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called "The hunt for the kidney stone" where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what's wrong with him (kidney stone).
After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. "You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example" she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.
Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think "What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous."
I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues...
Human memory is wild. We’re extremely good at inventing things that never happened, or adjusting memories over time as we recall them into something completely different than what actually happened. And it can feel so real.
When I was in my late teens, I ended up on a boat from Ft Lauderdale to the Bahamas. Theres no way no to go through just a little bit of the Burmuda Triangle. I remember freaking out / being super excited, wondering what crazy stuff things would happen on our journey. Of course, nothing happened. I was so disillusioned.
The triangle is HUGE, and due to where it covers, a lot of shipping went through it, and still does iirc.. Saying its dangerous because ships wrecked there often isn't that far off from calling Earth dangerous since every human has died there. It's a true statement, I suppose, but the context helps understand it's not a very reasonable one.
Happened to me once. I was super drunk walking home and didn't see an open manhole in front of me. I got super lucky, though.
From my drunk perspective, I'm just walking along when suddenly the ground is nearly at my eye level. Then I realised I'm dangling there, with only my head and elbows outside. I dragged myself out and continued on home.
I have no idea how I managed to fall inside with both my legs at the same time and why my arms didn't hurt like hell, not even in the morning.
Every time i was somewhere where i could see a big fall, i would get scared, thinking i would intentionally go there and fall to my death without noticing
I'm mildly scared of railings overlooking lower floors and such, thinking "I would get seriously injured if I somehow accidentally lean over this railing so much that I flip over to the other side and fall down."
I had the exact same fear when I was a kid, and crossing bridges was always very stressful for me. Even today, as an adult, it still bothers me a little, and when I'm driving I keep having these intrusive thoughts like: "What if I accidentally drive off this bridge?"
Where does this this linguistically phenomenon come from?
Is it a mistaken use of "an accident" with the preposition to reflect the personal involvement?
Mistakes like "Could of" make sense to me because in my accent "could of" and "could've" are identically voiced.
I can also completly understand where we get "alot" because alot is just the beginning of an acorn, minus a few hundred years of lazy pronunciation behind it (an oak corn =acorn)
Google is telling me it's because younger people will use "on accident" as an antonym for "on purpose". That sounds feesible as an origin. Now I'm questioning if "by intent" is grammatically correct, I've been staring at words too long.
My childhood fear was getting the vaccine shot for the swine flu which was a big issue in the mid 70's. My 5th grade class received new text books and there was a photo of a kid getting the vaccine shot. Instead of a needle it was delivered by a big device that looked like an uzi machine gun and I was terrified of it. Time passed and I never got the shot. That's when I learned how the news works.