I had this vague but persistent worry that everyone in my family was an alien in disguise.
(this was before Men In Black, mind you, so it wasn't from that!)
Seeing my mom wearing a greenish clarifying mask on her face one night almost seemed like proof, but still I was reluctant to classify it a "fact" in my mind. I was in some angst about this for quite a while.
Finally, one day when Mama was helping us three younger kids brush our teeth, I came to the conclusion that I didn't need to worry about it - cause even if Mom WAS an alien, she was an alien who loved me and that's what mattered!
I also thought I could catch up to my brother Jared's age. I was really thrilled one time when I miscalculated how old I would turn that year and thought I was going to be the same age as him. I think I was 4, 5 in November, and Jared was 6, 7 in January. I thought for one joyful moment that I would be six and we'd be the same age. It really was an exhilarating feeling, till I realized I was wrong.
Whenever we got our little baby Jesus doll out for the Christmas season, I loved to hold him in my arms. Secretly, I hoped that at his Second Coming he would come as a baby again so I could hold him like that.
I had ALL sorts of theories about time and time lines and how time worked (mostly created so I could reconcile time travel being real with the knowledge that it didn't work the way it did in movies and books I loved). This is the one I settled on when I was about 9.
Time moves in waves. If you plotted it on a diagram, it would look like this:
The tick marks indicate where people are living in time. The idea was that, in between these "waves" of time where people were living and doing, the world was just a setting with no people, like a giant abandoned stage.
If someone from one of these "waves" of living time traveled to an earlier time and then came back to their own time -
Their own time would not be affected by whatever changed in the past, because they're on a different "wave." As time passes, each wave moves forward. By the time the purplish-pink "wave" got to where the green one used to be, IT would be affected by those changed in the past, but only on THAT wave.
Meanwhile, if someone tried to travel back in time but accidentally hit one of the "blank spaces" between waves, there would be no people.
Just earth, the buildings and structures as they were at that time (according to the last wave that moved through it), wind and things, but no people.
And behold! This was my theory! Hope you enjoyed,
Lauren
