What did you, in wonder, believe in as a child, that being grown you now miss? Belief in Santa, Jesus, Love, People, Ghosts, the Future?

Nothing.

Santa, for a few years. Those innocent times were special. 

I longed for love.

At about 9 through to 14 late on a full moon summer night, I'd slip into the swimming pool, look up at the moon and imagine the Greek Goddess Aphrodite.
It arose from reading Greek mythology and having an inclination towards fantasy.
I prayed that one day when I grew up a man would love me.
It was a longing for escape. 
It didn't matter that the moon was supposed to have belonged to Artemis, hunter, lover of nymphs, and protectress of deer, wildlife and virgins.
Nor did I think in any clearer way of Hera, mother of the gods, Demeter, the goddess of crops and harvests, or Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.
In the Greek Pantheon, there was not one god or goddess to protect children or teach parents how to love them.
Rather, the gods punished children if they rebelled against cruel treatments.
I'm sure I was more than a little mad.

And yes, I knew the gods didn't exist but it still eased the pain to pray for love. This post was edited by inky at July 2, 2019 12:17 AM MDT

People

The Other Side!  It doesn't exist the way I imagined it. 

The Other Side is something only I believed in when I was a kid.  Anyway, I have aunts, uncles and cousins that live near Denver so we always drove to Colorado to visit them.  When you drive to Colorado from the east the mountains don't start until about 15 miles west of Denver so the part of Colorado that's east of Denver is flat farm and ranch land just like Nebraska and Kansas.

Anyway, what was on the other side of the mountains was the Other Side.  If humans tried to go there they would have to get through the Troll Kingdom first and the trolls wouldn't let people pass through their kingdom.  I thought the way it worked was Troll Kingdom started somewhere around Georgetown and then the Valley of the Unicorns was the part between Vail and Grand Junction and west of that was where the dinosaurs lived.

My parents were pretty insistent that there wasn't a Troll Kingdom or a Valley of the Unicorns or dinosaurs either.  Anyway, Mom and dad turned out to be right, six year old me was wrong.