The Real Unreal

The fourth Meow Wolf installation, the Real Unreal, has layers. On the surface, it is a colorful but unrevealing storefront in the Grapevine Mills shopping mall that invites shoppers to “come find yourselfs” [sic]. Its next lower stratum is a gift shop and café with an extremely peculiar floor plan and strange beverages like Gender Fluid for sale. And the next layer below that is a beautiful summer evening at a quiet suburban home… one slowly leaching into an extraordinary and alien multiverse.  

Meow Wolf is an art collective specializing in immersive, story-driven art installations. Like the House of Eternal Return and Convergence Station before it, the Real Unreal is built around an intriguing mystery with clues hidden in peculiar notes on refrigerators, cryptic sequences chanted through alleyway payphones, and the strange greetings given by otherworldly passers-by. In fact, the creators have indicated that the stories of all these places are connected, and that the Real Unreal and the House of Eternal Return are on the same multiversal cul-de-sac. 

Interaction with the art pieces in the Real Unreal are included with the ticket price, but guests are also invited to interact with over 20 Brain Beans hidden throughout the facility. These odd entities give out code words that can be texted to a provided phone number for extra clues and hints about their environs. 

There are over 165 individual projects that range wildly in size and scope, prepared by a coalition of over 500 contributors. The projects are arranged into nine anchor spaces that can be explored in almost any order. The Neon Kingdom, one of the anchor spaces more recessed in the facility, also contains a large stage area for shows and musical performances.