“Surrealist Breakfast” is the third piece of the series “Goodbye Real World.” It represents the third stage of the Philosophers’ journey and that is of Reconstruction. It seems like this should be real, it is the morning I am here with my family and we are having breakfast. Or are we? It is a surrealist breakfast because it is about reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”
I eat corn flakes therefore I am. I am doing what I always do so this must be real. Not necessarily. People’s perceptions of reality are different and the use of the 1950 design harks to a day of innocence and nostalgia, giving comfort, but also contrasts that “it ain’t the 50s anymore.” The ideals of what life should be, is not fitting with 2020 reality. The texture and painted style is to simulate living in an advertisement for cereal, with the expectations that are so hard to maintain. The mother is judgemental, like the 1950s time, mocking you with “what is wrong with you if your life is not like this?” It is a promise we were all given subconsciously, but was never delivered.
You have a choice. The red or the blue donut. You eat the red donut you stay in Wonderland and you see how deep the rabbit-hole goes. You eat the blue donut the story ends, you wake up in your lounge room and believe whatever you want to believe. You have experienced what the digital world can give and it’s surreal nature makes you realise how far reality is really away.
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