Sunlight patters inbetween the leaves, water runs through the garden. I move my mind from the lily to the flame in my hand, enter the third door–the one on the right. The concept of mental spaces that allow you to memorize things is quite appealing, isn't it? It's how the world's memory champions apparently do it: you walk through a house or go through an object, encountering bits of information conceptually tied to what you're looking at in some way. Maybe I can memorize language that way...a mental structure is good, but it's also extra baggage: when you need to memorize thousands of pieces of information demanding rapid recall, I think it's much better to just memorize the components themselves. It's too slow to see yourself going through a house, unlocking a door and examining a pot to remember what a word is! If we're going to place frameworks around those pieces of information, the frameworks should be intrinsically and fundamentally meaningful to the information...like the grammar of a language. Perhaps if linguists can come up with a perfect grammar for languages, we'll be able to learn them in a snap.

But I wonder if one couldn't make a mental palace intrinsically meaningful. Perhaps not a standalone 'memory palace,' but a supplementary series of rooms metaphorically linked to pieces of information you often struggle with. The floorplan and room contents could represent an internal logic ushering you towards successive pieces of information based on what you need. Different tones, surroundings in the rooms would act as markers. There'd be all sorts of connecting passageways–or maybe the rooms could arrange themselves. Why bother with a physically coherent space, if you can make a mentally coherent one? Logic doesn't follow physical geometry.

Reckon that's a lot like dreaming: a physically less-than-coherent space that uses deft and delicate mental connections to maneuver all over the place. Dreaming shows us how to think in ways we never come up with ourselves...I wonder if dreaming is sublime thought, and if the fusion of the waking mind with dreaming thought should be our goal.