Alethea thought she was going mad. When she awoke that morning, she went downstairs for breakfast and her banana started talking to her! It said it wasn’t really real. It told her it was just a shadow on a cave wall and that everything in the world around her was just an illusion.

Alethea said: “don’t be ridiculous,’ and picked it up. “Look, I can hold you dammit!”

“Er, no you can’t,” the banana replied nonchalantly. “You don’t actually touch anything. You always remain at least one atom’s width away from everything because electrons repel each other.”

Alethea stared at the banana with an incredulous look on her face. Apart from the fact that she wasn’t sure how a banana could talk, she was equally unsure how it knew so much about electrons and atoms. She whacked it on the table.

“Ow!” the banana squealed. “What did you do that for?”

“Just to see if you were real,” Alethea replied. “And that proves my point. If you weren’t real you couldn’t feel pain.”

“And yet, your feelings get hurt and they aren’t real in that sense are they?”

“Shut up. You’re a banana. Bananas don’t talk, and besides, I can feel your weight in my hands, so you must be real.”

“Well, an object’s weight is relative to the amount of gravity exerted upon it. So, here on earth it has weight, but take it into space and it wouldn’t weigh anything.”

Alethea wiped the sleep from her eyes in disbelief. This was going to be a grand day she thought. She had to go to work in a minute, and here she was having a scientific debate with a banana. 

“Hah ha!” she cried triumphantly. “I can see you. You’re yellow. Get out of that one.”

“Strictly speaking, I’m not yellow,” the banana said. “In fact, I don’t possess colour. It’s only when light shines upon me either by reflection, diffusion or refraction that ‘colour’ occurs. In my case, I’m absorbing all the colours that make up white light, but reflecting yellow. This means yellow is the colour I’m not, and even then, I’ll appear different colours under different light conditions.”

Alethea sighed. “I’ve got to go to work, and my boss is a real pain in the backside. I can’t be starting the day having an argument with a piece of fruit. I can see you, you’re right in front of me, and let that be an end to it.”

“Wrong again!” the banana laughed. “I’m right in front of you yes, but that’s not where the image of me is. Your brain is constructing the image of me from light and other information it receives from your senses. That means the image of me is only in your brain. Your brain fools you by making you think the image is projected outside of itself.”

Alethea was getting annoyed. “I can smell you. You smell bananery.”

“Oh dear, you don’t know much do you. Whilst it’s true that most of us sense smells that are roughly the same, smell is very subjective and varies from individual to individual. Some people don’t have a sense of smell, while others have a condition that makes all smells repulsive. Smell declines in people after their teens. Besides, humans cannot distinguish between some smells such as almonds and arsenic so smell is hardly reliable.”

“I’d be able to taste you though, wouldn’t I?”

“Again, tastes are just a series of sensations and are strongly linked to smell. If your nose was blocked, you’d have difficulty tasting me.”

“Can I hear you?” Alethea asked lamely.

“Until it enters the brain, sound is a mechanical process, but once there it is subject to the brains’ psychological interpretation, prejudices, predispositions and expectations known as psychoacoustics. These can alter and affect what we think we hear.  And hearing sound is dependent on it having a medium to travel in. Place me in a vacuum and you wouldn’t hear me.”

“You’re very clever for a banana.”

“Why, thank you.”

“In fact, you’re so clever it makes me feel quite guilty that I’m going to eat you. But, you are my breakfast after all.”

“What? You don’t think you should save me? I should be on TV. A talking banana? I could be a national celebrity,” the banana appealed. 

“Nah, I’m famished,” Alethea said flatly. “And besides, as you said, you’re just an illusion aren’t you?”

As she peeled the banana, she thought it strange that she wasn’t actually touching it. She ignored its screams, because, after all, they were open to interpretation weren’t they? When she bit into it, she swore she could taste and smell it, but she’d now learned that wasn’t reliable either. Still, for an imaginary banana it tasted delicious, she thought to herself. Afterwards, Alethea got up from the breakfast table and put on her coat and shoes. She cursed at the time it took her to find her phone, but she grabbed another banana from the fruit bowl and ate it greedily. After all, she mused, she didn’t have to worry about putting weight on any longer, because that was just a trick of gravity wasn’t it? 

‘Now, I wonder if I can persuade my boss she is just a shadow on a cave wall,’ she thought, as she locked the front door and walked to the bus stop. “Nah, she’d never fall for it. She may not be real, but she’s the only reality I’ve got.”