I think what you're specifically trying to do is what is referred to as "world-building" or
paracosms, the sort of thing that authors tend to use, especially for complex universe narratives.
I'm a world-builder, a lucid dreamer, and have interest in memory loci.
World-building is the sort of thing a child does, so that was an early habit and is probably a good basis if you're wanting to make a mentalscape. You can tell if you have a propensity for world-building if you enjoy things like high fantasy writing (alternative universes with different physics, lots of strange names, complex symbology, etc.), immersive video games with narratives, or like to contemplate tangential everyday occurrences. World-building is all about the ability for
visualizing a separate world.
I came to
lucid dreaming naturally, so I can't quite help you there but that WikiHow article isn't too far off. I'd say that lucid dreaming is like a side benefit of world-building rather than an essential skill. I can create much more nuance when daydreaming about my mindscape then when I'm in dreams.
Good points in the WikiHow article:
- Dream journaling is essential because you never retain dreams. I like typing them up because the best time to write about what happened in your dream is immediately after waking, and the times I have hand-written them they were absolutely incomprehensible. Do this for all types of dreams.
- Prep yourself for dreaming right before you go to bed. If I do not go into sleep without entering a dream I've constructed for myself, I will most likely not dream at all, not even a non-lucid dream.
- Prolonging a lucid dream is very difficult and yes, if you get too excited about having a lucid dream you can wake yourself out of it. I can tell a dream cannot go further if everything I do has no effect on the "narrative" or "path" the dream is supposed to go and if I keep getting confused and things become visually/emotionally unstable.
Lucid dreaming is about the
emotions that occur within a mindscape and the REM phase plus body paralyzation emphasizes this. Lucid dreaming can therefore help prep you for using your mindscape as a psychological refuge.
Interestingly, I first came across the subject of
memory loci in Thomas Harris's
Hannibal series. Hannibal has an ornate memory palace and Harris pretty much modeled it on the descriptions the books in bibliography gave (I'm pretty sure there was a bibliography and that's where I read the source material from, I may be wrong). Sherlock Holmes also utilizes a memory palace and additionally he explains to Watson his approach to it:
I consider a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
He says this in response to Watson's incredulity that Sherlock "threw out" common knowledge of astronomy and Copernican heliocentricism from his knowledge repertoire. Memory palaces are useful for organizing memory and in the purpose of mindscaping, being able to visualize your own personal knowledge and memory rather than construct a different world. I believe Hannibal also contains his worst memories in a specific area of his palace, which is more likely what Sherlock has done with knowledge he's deemed "un-useful" as you cannot truly ever dispose of memory.
As far as memory loci, I've physically drawn out plans and I've created a couple of rooms but to truly manage a memory palace you need to have a good system as well as time to "organize" all your current memories into rooms/objects, and I haven't been motivated to go through all that. I'd say a formal memory palace is not quite what you're looking to do.
In my day-to-day life, having a mindscape/world of my own is pretty useful. I am literally never bored. If I were locked away I would have less trouble with mental deprivation. I most frequently use it as a place to go during a boring lecture or when I'm synthesizing thoughts. I use it also as a place to "rehearse" conversations and to gather my words together into sentences I can use in conversation.
The downsides of having a place of my own is that it's so easy to slip into and it develops too easily into a handicap. If you're in your own world, there is not a reason to seek out actual immersive stimulation. I'm the kind of person that people describe as quote "in their own world" or otherwise aloof and uninterested. Yes, this can be a place for you to retreat to but there are psychological effects, and I at least know of one term which is "maladaptive daydreaming" which is pretty much dreaming away to the point that you replace actual interaction with imaginative interaction.
Read a lot about memory and how the mind works, a few good articles like from Lifehacker are sufficient enough as people love hearing about mind theory and it gets synthesized a lot. Also know yourself emotionally and how your own thought process works. Focus on how to make your mind agile and understand how you prioritize your thoughts, memories, and knowledge. This helps you understand how your world will be organized and what certain places in that world are meant to function as. I also found that the kid's movie
Inside Out (2015) used a lot of current theory about the brain and memory, such as each time you "touch" a memory is it changed and colored by your current emotions, so you can include that in research.
If you'd like specifics about my own constructs, I can describe them. But this is my first post in like...3-4 years so I don't remember how to make sure I check up on this. Oh. And I've just seen my signature.
