Written by Eve Danziger
Art by Lillian Anderson
One day, I came across a social media post asking how many seagulls you would have to find inside of your house before you start to think someone’s putting them there. I would eventually forget about this post, but that’s what started this icebreaker obsession of mine.
When I meet new people, I have a few default icebreaker questions. Some normal icebreakers would be “What’s your major?” or “What’s your favorite food?”, but those must’ve been too boring for me, so I came up with my own. I have so many more than the ones I listed here, but I thought I should limit it to three:
If there was a magical chair, what do you think it would do? Not what you want it to do, just the first thing that comes to mind.
Bored out of my mind, I looked around my room wondering what each thing would do if it was magical. Magical pencil? It’d probably write for you. Magical clock? Maybe you could move through time with it. On this train of thought, when my sibling walked in, I asked them what they thought a magical chair would do. They said that it would probably be able to walk, which was weird, because I had assumed a magical chair would fly. This is now one of my favorite icebreaker questions. I’ve gotten answers ranging from “teleports you to a chair dimension” to “kills you instantly” and it’s always entertaining.
If you could see the statistics of your life up until now, what would you want to know?
The next icebreaker I came up with was based on a thought I’ve been having since I was young. I’ve always wondered how many times I’ve lied to someone, or said the word “the”, or jumped, or breathed, or even had this thought. It kind of reminds me of that counter you can see in some games that say how many blocks you’ve placed or times you’ve typed in chat. Thus, the question was born. I’ve decided that it has the ability to quantify things that can’t normally be quantified, like “Out of 100, how happy am I on average” and that you can’t know stats where you aren’t the subject. For example, “How many times has my crush thought about me” wouldn’t work, but “How many people have had a crush on me” would work. You also can’t know anything about the future, like “How many years will I live” or “how many years do I have left”. These extra rules I set are really just there because there are going to be arguments over what counts. Sometimes, I don’t even say the extra rules if they aren’t related to someone’s answer. Plus, it’s really all about the fun. If someone asks if they can have more than one answer, I usually let them share both and ask why they couldn’t choose.
Do you have any weird dream logic? If you do, what is it?
Another question I like to ask people is “Do you have any weird dream logic?”. Then I would explain what counts as “dream logic”. “Dream logic” is a term my mom told me about, meaning odd consistencies in your dreams which don’t occur in real life. For example, if she put a wet rag over her mouth in her dreams, she could breathe underwater. This obviously doesn’t happen in real life, but any time she’s underwater in a dream, she’ll think “Oh! I need a wet rag!”. For me, if my dream is in a real place, sometimes there’s a staircase that isn’t normally there. If I go up or down it, my dream will without fail turn into a nightmare.
What’s the point of icebreakers? I mean, they’re to get to know someone better, but are the ones we normally use good at that? I’m sure you know that if a teacher wants a class to all be friends with each other, asking them to go around in a circle saying their favorite movie isn’t going to do that. Knowing that someone’s favorite color is blue doesn’t really tell you that much about them. To be fair, it’d probably take a psychologist to find out what saying that a magical chair would change color so it never clashes with the colors around it means, like a spoken Rorschach test, but it shows me how receptive you are to my absurd questions. I might not know your favorite food, but I do know that you have an intense hatred for seagulls, crazy vivid dreams, and the will to answer my stupid questions. I know that you’re someone who I enjoy talking to, even if it’s about a hypothetical magic chair.