Hi again, dear mnemonists 
I’ve been off this site for some time. Now I’d like to share my progress with my episodic memory.
In the summer I read about reusing memory palaces for long term memorization, and was really fascinated about it. When suddenly I wanted to memorize sth quickly, then like all mnemonist I constantly had this bugging problem: “In which palace and where exactly should I place it?” :puzzled: But what if I were to reuse the same palace over and over again. That would speed things up.
But then that palace would have to be HUGE. And it would have to be systemized, divided into journeys. So what I did was that I took 7 long linear journeys from massive buildings or a journey from computer game map (those I had to make longer, because CS maps aren’t notoriously loci-rich), and each one divided into 7 parts. Now I added the journeys alongside each other and got a really big square that consisted of 7x7 parts.
Why number 7? Because there are 7 days in week. I could divide the palace into 4x7=28 linear journeys (by rotating myself 4 times), each journey consisting of 7 parts, and each day use one of them. No problem with “What journey to use?” any more. So, each month I use the same palace ca 1 time.
Mentally constructing this palace was the hardest and time consuming imagination exercise I’d ever done. The problem was that each journey was a part of a bigger map/building, and it’s really hard to demolish the existing constructs into new one. For example journeys B1 and B2 were from the same spa-hotel, and in reality they were perpendicular, but now they had to be alongside each other (parallel).
The problem wasn’t visualizing them next to each other. It also wasn’t moving (on the map) from left->right or right->left, it was moving from up->down or down->up (from a locus of one journey to its adjacent locus of the neighbour journey), because my brain subconsciously wanted to move into the old surroundings of the journeys. Finally I just used my 00-99 PAO and assigned a number to each little square. That made the navigation a lot easier. After 2 months I was able to move quite freely in every direction.
But how to differentiate between the same journeys of different months. Easy, each month has to have its own frame:
<img <img=“” alt=“7x7_4.jpg” height=“281” src=“https://artofmemory.com/files/u3876/7x7_4.jpg” width=“500”/>
(frame loci 15-21 are outside of the picture)
Day 1 starts from locus1 and goes to square11, day2: locus2->square21, and so on. So far I’ve picked 5 frames for 5 months. Some of them weren’t very good, for example July 2014 was in an isolated beach and I couldn’t find 28 loci (they had to be circularly placed!). August was in my hometown stadium, that was better, but I should have repeated it more times, now I can’t even recall all loci. September, October, and November were circular areas of that same town. Again, I was lazy when it came to repetition and forgot a lot of images that I placed at the loci. Some days I didn’t even bother to store my memories.
In December I decided to compose the frame myself, day by day. Each day I would pick a place that I visited and add it to the frame. This would save me from finding good circular areas that I’m familiar with. I decided that the loci have to be somehow spatially structurized, so here is a stencil ( in the left) that I sometimes (mentally) use for placing the loci.
What was a bit disturbing again was the problem of merging existing loci. Lembran Sar says he uses one image per day, but there is a difference between wether that mnemonic image is an object or a picture. If it is an object, then of course it doesn’t have any surrounding and the problem is gone. But I like to use pictures - the places where I went, rooms, etc. Then I somehow have to blend the edges of the pictures together: for example picture 1 forms the stair to 2; pictures 3,4,5 blend together and then place them on 2; then 6 and 7 form another stair to 2 at the other end (pretty much like the stencil above, only that one is a bit too linear). Just placing 28 pictures onto a square next to each other won’t do. What also helped a lot was linking.
Of course, building a frame/memory palace entirely from objects could be even harder, because they have no edges to merge (just linking them also won’t do, because you’ll have to see them next to each other, otherwise you won’t get a MP). What we usually do is that we take an existing place and there we put an object, and link it to the locus. Not linking places to locus or merging objects and places together. Although I admit, if the places are imaginary/movie scenes (not real ones), then constructing a palace of them is really fun and easily memorable.
I also drew a picture (sorry, I am not a good drawer 
) of the december frame to show you:
In the center on the platform is me, rotating myself. Although I could recall all the loci without standing in the center, but rotating in the center I can concentrate to each side separately.
Another problem was that some days I didn’t go out of the house or watched a video that I could use as a locus. Or I just didn’t bother to (You can notice the “?”-s in the picture).Or I started studying in the morning and I yet didn’t have the locus.
So, how to easily get each day a new locus that’s not completely random (e.g first picture you find in the internet doesn’t quite represent your day). Dreaming, of course. Starting from 27th December I force myself not to get up from the bed before I have recalled as much scenes/places I can remember of the dream, and merge the places of the dream into one map. Sometimes I can recall only one place, but that’s enough. Sometimes like 6-7 and I get a memory palace for the day (and if I run out I continue with the daily journey in the 7x7 palace or use some movie palace). But I have to revise the dream palace at least once during the same day, and also some time later, because dreams are very easily forgettable. Atm this regime fits for me because I’ve always wanted to remember my dreams, they make so cool palaces (I’m emotionally attached to them).
What about my project reusing the 7x7 palace? I found out that long linear journeys arent’t very good. And using the same journey more than 2-3 times also isn’t good. I also have to attach each journey’s beginning to the frame to differentiate the same journeys of different months, and to remind me to revise the journey some time later, and then blend the filled journey inside the frame. It’s really lot of work and thus I try avoid using them (a lot of empty work ). and instead use my dream frame or a movie palace (which I have A LOT [it’s really easy to make them, if you’re a movie fan], now all placed into one single MMP).
At least the hard work of composing the 7x7 took me to sth more exiting - dreamframes. Maybe I could use nonlinear journeys of the 7x7, each month go different way from the same frame locus. Perhaps that would make them more memorable and more easily distinguishable.
