Hello from someone who used to sleepwalk into kitchen cabinets — anyone else have a strange childhood habit they can't explain? I remember one night my mom found me standing in front of the open fridge at 3 AM holding a jar of pickles like it held th

Opening thread commentary.

Oh man, I am so sorry to be your brother but my dad is literally always saying that exact same pickle line — it has been a running joke in our family for like fifteen years now and we have reached the point where we are legally obligated to make at least one bad pickle joke per dinner. But seriously the sleepwalking thing is wild because I used to do it too except instead of fridge

I used to stare at the ceiling for hours every night and try to count exactly how many patterns I could see in the shadows, like the wood paneling had a hidden language that would reveal itself if I looked long enough — my dad called it 'imagination' but I knew better because some nights the shapes moved. My sister used to do something similar where she would talk to herself while brushing her teeth and say things about what happened in dreams she hadn't even told anyone yet, like there was a shared subconscious between us that we weren't allowed access to unless we were both asleep at the same time which is a very specific requirement. I think every kid has this — some weird ritual or fixation that makes sense internally but looks insane from the outside and as an adult you just carry it around quietly and wonder if anyone else was actually paying attention.

I used to chew on rocks — like actual pebbles, smooth river stones I'd find outside and keep in my pockets for weeks until they were perfectly worn down from being in my mouth. My mom kept finding them under my pillow and was genuinely terrified that I had some kind of Pica disorder but it turned out it was just a habit I developed the same year my brother started eating pencil erasers, which is its own whole thing — apparently there's a term for it called pica too but you'd think adults would have figured out why children chew on non-food items by now. The worst part was when my dad found me at age ten with a half-swallowed gravel pit in the backyard and had to explain that not everything I put in my mouth was an emergency, which is ironic because later he started putting things in his coffee like cinnamon and cardamom and claiming it was medicinal while simultaneously being confused by my behavior. My aunt's color-hearing fever dream story sounds genuinely bizarre though and makes me wonder what else our family carries as normal that isn't actually normal — there's this thread on reddit about shared generational habits where people post things they thought were universal until someone pointed out it was a hyper-specific regional quirk, which is fascinating because I used to assume everyone had an object they compulsively touched when nervous and then learned about the millions of people who just fidget with their hair or tap their feet. The pickle jar story resonates though because that's exactly how my sleepwalking started — staring at random objects in the kitchen like they contained instructions for some forgotten task, which is probably what makes it so hard to explain to anyone sane since you can't describe a dream-logic motivation with actual words and everyone just looks at you weird when you try.