Weird that I didn’t find this before in my other account.
Interesting, imaginary palaces work and for me work much better than real places. Imaginary places by definition are imaginary, they are a complex collection of pictures from images you have accumulated over years. However, you have to order them. Anything is a place in memory. My imaginary places are located in imaginary worlds: I find my imaginary places are more malleable than my real life palaces. Now the creating an imaginary place depends on you either allowing yourself to go by inspiration or go by planned design (could be visualizing a blueprint or drawing one).
For instance the first time I thought of a memory palace it was an imaginary place with imaginary characters doing things, it was like walking through a videogame (I still remember it and I never used it, from 2017). However I tried to imagine a hotel and by the fact that I wanted so many things to look alike, the process was super confusing and tiresome, though that was back in 2017. Today my imagination is better, I created fanstastic places in less than 2-3 minutes. I even go by outside places, but here’s my trick: I don’t care about real life physics, logic. Colors, roads, interior design, it is all as I want it to be. As I create them I noticed from which real life images (including videogames and everything I’ve seen) I’m getting inspired.
The problem arise when you want to see something that you’ve never seen: like a new color, or combinations of colors or things. But to solve that problem two things: I imagine little details by details or I encouraged real life inspiration. Example of this two approaches:
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I want to imagine a woman with horns, wings and clothes of my liking, but similar to someone three different women I’ve met, I want to see the combination of them. I go with the image of one of the women, then I add the horns, then I twist the face little to look more surreal but I try to see the horns as realistic as possible, then I recall the faces of the other two and I keep “drawing” the woman fusion, put the wings (I decide how they’ll look like), at this point it be better for me to select a place and place the women there (do this after, I don’t place the three original girls in the place first, so I don’t create a new memory), so it becomes rather a mnemonic, a cue, and I keep twisting the faces, seeing, recalling, and recalling the new shape and keep twisting and so on. The same way with fantastic places, though this is better for character images, people, creatures and objects. Small things are better to picture like this, though nothing stop you from using these images as memory palaces
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I want to imagine a house with X and Y characteristics I saw somewhere else. I recall the place, the part I want to model from my palace, I select a place in my “memory world of preference” and there I select the outside (this part doesn’t need to be very detailed, because you may never use the outside as loci), then I imagine an entrance (again modelled from somewhere, I don’t try to do something new as in the first example), and as I do this, sometimes my mind just bring images really rapidly.
Whatever road you do, review your places. Also, characters can help you create the sense of deepness. Example, I imagine an empty game room in a literal imaginary palace, I placed a clown doing I don’t know what, then with the image of the clown, I got inspired to put furniture: billiard pool… but I decided to let it empty, what I did anyways with the room was to place in there at the door a bunch of balloons like from a party… then the day to used the place came when I was reading Kazia Wasowski Body Language book, and I placed them 11 good signs, as I visualized the mnemonic I also created the loci: two guys playing billiard doing a sign each, a bar three woman doing three more, and so. I still remembered, though I destroyed the room, so when I’m in the palace to the direction where the “door” to the room would be, there’s now a wall.
Obviously both methods use images stored in my brain from things I’ve need: nothing new can be generated in your mind without a basis on something percived. Another thing, if you want to imagine crazy visuals as in fantasy movies: watch fantasy. I read comics and manga, I watch many things, if there’s something where there will be great visuals I don’t miss it, because it will be something my brain add to the arsenalm, also a way to not let all those years of watching cartoons as a kid… (wasted years).
Benefits of imaginary places (judging by my expirience):
- Speed in memorization your mnemonic images.
- As you don’t recall a place, you don’t have conflict of changes in recall.
- As fast as you create them you can already create mnemonic images.
- You can use the place you’re in as a reference.
- This trains your imagination and probably your episodic memorization of things you see.
Maybe this won’t work in others, maybe it does.
Have a it! 