I did that as a child, and I distinctly remember it. Norman O. Brown said sublimation is the search in the outside world for the lost body of childhood. Sublimated entertainment has replaced play. To return to childhood, to the body, to instinctual wisdom is the seminal issue. One begins to fear the sun, the breeze, animals, the night.
Life becomes phobic and populated with danger at every turn.
I'm sure that somewhere there is even a story about floating and how an undertow spirited them off to oblivion. These horror stories are told by the ton on every beach, a kind of echolalia of the eleven o'clock news. Tales of fear and woe proliferate in our society for the purpose at the conscious level, of protecting the child from danger, but at the unconscious level, to keep one at a distance from inner feelings. At bottom it is a war against vulnerability. Some young people are acutely aware of the fear-market, ignore the news and escape its cautiousness by catapulting themselves back into childhood using a few illegal levers.