Superstitions

[FFoxX]

Though we know that it really isn't that way. Personally, it makes the sinking experience way more exciting if I can get myself to believe that it is bottomless and could suck me under. Typically, it is easier said than done. Sometimes I can convince myself of “obvious bullshit” by getting drunk.

I think this is very interesting psychological effect common to us who like sinking, when the normaly negative arousal caused by some specific insecurity is somehow reframed to very positive form of arousal. I see similar effect in cases of notoric gamblers.

[Villein]

Watch an elephant get mired around a watering hole. Watch a mammoth sink into tar.
Fall yourself into the uncertainty of a landscape hungry for your demise and be late for Mastadon Fridays at Club Teletak.

You must be living in what your inbred descendants will lovingly call the Stone Age.

Watch the shift of landscape as a literal garden of Eden becomes an enormous desert and talk about it to that rare sort that can read and write!
Have your children, wife, husband, relatives drown in such circumstances while you've got a lot of dark hours pondering the nature of the Universe as an alternative to grinding your rotting teeth in prayer or getting drunk in the public house.

You're probably living where Hammurabi is a current ruler and not an early Mac/Dos game so it's probably the Bronze Age or early BCE.

Stick a Knight in armour and have him cross any swampy or coastal area on horseback, foot or even just in getting off a boat onto shore.
Have it get mentioned in stories about the giant slayer Arthur or Beowulf.
Have such stories be quite reasonable in comparison to a land where the ground is the sky and people have legs attached to their head.

You're probably stuck in the Middle Ages, minus the table service and with a lot more severed heads and missing fingers.

Discussing the turn of events in the public house the Sunday after the novel came out, you're chewing the fat with fellow readers at your local.
Alistair is arguing with 'Dunner' Browne and his mate Thomas Anderson about the latest Stevenson.
You're probably in a pub in Edinburgh in the mid-to-late 19th century. Mind your manners.

It's raining outside and there's talk of the Soviet states signing the Warsaw pact in the papers. You're sitting with your date after waiting for half an hour to buy tickets and having a swell time trying to find your lighter that fell out of your pocket.
Next to you is your dream girl, the one you've been more than swell on since high school. The one who listens to you babble on about how the country's changing and how we'll be living on the moon by the nineties.
She is as uncomfortable as ever but when you looked in her eyes you saw her surprise as Vera Miles stumbled forward as she's stumbles from that python and heard that quiet squelch.
The pair of you turn and look at each other and know that you'll be watching re-runs on cable in forty years together.

You must be in a theatre in the United States of America sometime in May 1955, watching Tarzan's Hidden Jungle more than you expected for a date picture.

You're late home from a meeting to discuss monetising the New Economy, how to rip off the Sovereign and drafting a B2b (Bullshit2bullshit) press release before bed while slightly drunk.
Lo and behold you're fumbling for the volume control on your state-of-the-art Pentium computer when you open a separate window to be greeted with "Help me, I'm in Quicksand!"

You must be me, sometime in the late 1990's!
Somebody just won (or lost) life's lottery.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this myth is as old as the oral tradition of storytelling.
It existed as a non-sexual myth that either became sexualised at some point or always was for some of us.

And by some, I mean us.

[quickbeard]

In a time when it is easy to believe that spirits live in the world around you, suddenly the ground gives way before your eyes. You watch a friend dressed in boots and leather and wool clothing panicking and struggling as the earth clings to his clothes and seems to move with each struggle. You try to help pull him free but the combined weight of him and his mud sodden clothes is too heavy and he disappears beneath the surface. And you live to tell the tale of how the ground came alive (quick) and swallowed your friend before your eyes...

[Nessie]

The belief was that the victim had a "stomach cramp," and could not swim in a doubled-up position that forced them into. I'd bet there are people here who still believe that it is dangerous to swim after eating.

Y'know...I was told this when I was a kid and I just don't know why but I knew that it was rubbish even then..."How stupid are grown-ups?"...and as an adult, I have ignored this advice hundreds of times, in both water and mud, in all temperature ranges, and I have suffered absolutely no "stomach cramps", ever, as a result of having just eaten a meal.

I avoid drowning by not doing stupid stuff. Like, not swimming beyond my physical capabilities or sinking outside my comfort level.

Eating a good nutritious meal before a swim -- or a sinking -- will help you, not hurt you. I told my models, "If you're watching your weight and you're on a diet, please ignore the calorie count on shoot day. This will be hard work. Trust me...you need the fuel!"

Nessie

[Boggy Man]

While not dangerous, I find that eating just before a submergence sink (especially when using a breathing tube) results in a lot of discomfort, with a bloated feeling and lots of phlegm in my throat that I have to keep clearing away, which interferes with my breathing, which is relieved once I rise back up high enough.

[FFoxX]

I avoid drowning by not doing stupid stuff. Like, not swimming beyond my physical capabilities or sinking outside my comfort level.

You don't need to be race driver to be able to drive safely. So in case you encounter any problem, you have to know how to get into safe position where you can calm down instead of panic.

[Villein]

I had a reverse-feeding problem when I lived in FNQ.
While there was a lot of nice mud around it also could be popular, as could all esturine waterways, with salt-water crocodiles.

Sure they loved sandy beaches as well.
But it's easier to run across an open beach than it is than across a mud bank of thigh-deep quagmire.

[nachtjaeger]

This idea would make a great scene. Imagine somebody who knows the physics of sinking, plus has experience in deep mud- and suddenly the bog they're trying to cross really does grab their legs and start sucking them down.

[FFoxX]

Somenody chased by crocodile?