I’ve been having a lot of deja vu lately and I’m not sure how I should feel about it. It’s very strange and usually only lasts a moment or so, but I’m curious. So I did some research because, what causes deja vu anyway?
Deja vu itself is neurologically fascinating and there are a number of theories about what exactly happens that causes the unshakeable sense of recognition. One theory is that your brain is recording events as they occur and they can sometimes become a memory-in-progress so the brain is ‘remembering’ something as it happens. It could also be an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory and those responsible for long-term memory. So basically deja vu is an anomaly of memory. What an interesting thought. Somewhere along the neurological pathways in my brain responsible for recall, there is a persistent short circuit and that’s what is causing my deja vu. An interesting and related phenomena is jamais vu, which is the inverse of deja vu where you experience a sudden unfamiliarity with something familiar (like all of the times when I look at a common word and it suddenly seems incredibly strange and foreign). Here I thought I had memories that were lost in my subconscious and would only resurface for a brief instant when really my wires were just a little crossed and my brain was confusing itself.
So how can I relate this to VW? I’ve been playing with the everyday in ‘everyday motoring pleasure’ because everyday things are generally boring, so maybe seeing them in a new light (like for the first time, or again and again with deja vu) can make for an interesting ad. Hmm…
There’s a Switchfoot song that kind of inspires me called “Faust Midas and Myself” about a man who wakes up in someone else’s life and I want to use a similar theme. So say a thirty-something guy wakes up one day, it’s a gloomy overcast day. He eats oatmeal for breakfast, goes about his commute (which includes sitting in traffic), has an uneventful workday, more commute, TV dinner, goes to bed. The same guy wakes up the next day and everything is slightly different. It’s sunny out, his girlfriend/wife is slightly hotter, he has a great hair day, he drives a VW instead of a junker, he doesn’t work in a cubicle, his favorite song comes on the radio during his commute and he jams out comically, whatever. Basically it’s a snapshot of how a VW would make every day a little better because it puts the motoring pleasure into your everyday. That could even be a slogan or something.
This is a sweet little nugget of an idea that I can see being much more fully developed as a series. It could be different people experiencing this phenomena (a stressed mom for example), situations where a VW makes something ‘everyday’ more pleasurable (like how Fun Theory improves quality of life by making ‘good’ things like recycling fun), or something else entirely. I’m leaving some loose ends so I can expend on the concept later.
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