A Model of the Godhead and its Contents - Part III: The Dreamsleeve
This will be exceedingly confusing if you don't read at least Part I! And Part II's comments contain the roots of this post!
What the hell is the Dreamsleeve, and what does it contain?
The nature of the Dreamsleeve has been one of the most confusing aspects of the lore for me for the very beginning. It's been called a magical internet, it's considered a soul recycling system, it's theorized to be the Center where the Dreamer sleeps...
I think it's all of these. But maybe not in the way you're used to thinking of it. I fully expect this bit of elaboration will be somewhat controversial, because the Dreamsleeve itself is so contradictory and many of us have built ideas of what it is or might be. But, here we go:
Under the excellent influence of /u/Jaridase_Zasmyocl, /u/laurelanthalasa, and /u/IceFireWarden, I've come to see the Dreamsleeve as the portions of the Godhead between Amaranths. For one thing, it certainly feels accurate to describe the thing around Dreams as the Dreamsleeve. I've always thought it was odd to consider the Dreamsleeve as containing the Dreamer that contains the Dreamsleeve. So now I don't!
As for its contents, well, earlier in this series of posts I described the medium of the Godhead as "concept-blank", as containing only the rules required for Dreams to form. But now I don't think that's an appropriate descriptor. Rather, I think /u/laurelanthalasa hit the nail on the head when she said this:
> it's basically stable systems swimming in an infinite river of data.
That is, the Dreamsleeve, all the parts of the Godhead that aren't Amaranths, is the infinite river of data. It contains and transmits all information, all possible things, all possible ideas. But it's incoherent. It's jumbled, almost impossible to parse, indistinguishable from random noise, and so, despite being utterly full of stimuli, it provides the sensory deprivation necessary for an Amaranth to start up a Dream. It's like a white noise machine, y'know?
How does it recycle souls?
I think this will require a re-thinking of what souls are. People who've seen me around here in the last few months might recall that I'm fond of a particular idea of what souls are like. I'll ask them to endure once more!
Unlike in real world modern religions, I think souls in TES should be thought of as made of multiple parts, which can be separated. At a minimum, I think there are two such parts: The AE, the information that is the soul's identity, history, memories, personhood, and so on; and the animus, the spark, the little star, the hole that draws magicka from the environment, which is then used by the identity to animate the body according to its desires.
I think this has a lot do with why enchanting isn't considered necromancy by Tamrielic society at large. When you're enchanting a weapon or trinket or shield or rock or whatever, you don't have to tie an identity down to it. You can take a "white soul," that is, only the animus of the soul, and slap a different set of information on it to make use of the magicka it gathers (that would be the spell that the enchantment casts). But if you use a black soul, the animus and the identity tied together, then it's necromancy.
Consequently, I don't think black and white souls have anything to do with Arkay's decision or sentience or power or any of that. I think it boils down to whether you can remove the identity from the animus. This has to do with whether the AE considers its soul to be indivisible, whether it believes the animus to be inextricably part of their identity; this constitutes a grip on the animus that is extremely difficult to break. This handily explains why Vivec apparently has a white soul, according to TES III (hir AE knows better re: the animus), why Falmer appear to be regaining their sentience but still have white souls (their culture probably doesn't espouse an indivisible soul), why a mammoth has a grand soul despite being relatively simplistic (size of animus is unrelated to sophistication of AE), etc. As for the Orsimer, I've seen no convincing argument they ever had anything but "black" souls. I have since revised this particular position: Arkay blesses some people to protect them from being soul trapped without their permission. This has to do with whether cultures that are mythically "in charge" of Arkay and his aspects regard a class of beings as "people." The souls themselves aren't changed at all. The only difference between a white soul and a black soul is whether Arkay has warded it in this way.
Okay, so, now that I've elaborated on this particular idea of souls, where does the Dreamsleeve get involved? I think it's as simple as the Dreamsleeve being the place where all information comes from, including the information that makes up an identity. It doesn't recycle a soul as a whole so much as take in the information of an identity, which gets lost, absorbed, in the random noise. Its elements may get used again, shuffled in with others, when another identity is pulled from the noise by Anu, or another Amaranth. The animus, then, may wind up within an enchantment, taken by some divinity for its own purposes, or trapped in a soul gem indefinitely.
(Note that it would also be possible for a divinity to take an identity rather than let it fade back into the random noise of the Dreamsleeve. This would be the case of a "soul" winding up in an afterlife rather than being recycled. And notice that the identity in particular, the AE, is what is usually said to "align" with a divinity in this case.)
Magical internet?
So, if the Dreamsleeve is external to Amaranths by definition, how can it be used by Anu's mortals to communicate with each other?
Well, how does Anu pull identities from the Dreamsleeve? I think it's simply tied to an Amaranth's nature in shaping the noise into stable systems. The mortals, as pieces of Anu, have this ability as well. They're shaping little loops of information from one part of Anu to another; memospores, meme-spores, bits of information launched into the Dreamsleeve's wind and retrieved by knowledge of its presence. They might just misunderstand what the Dreamsleeve is, and what it indicates about the nature of their reality.
A memospore without a pre-prepared receiving destination, then, would just get lost in the noise, a message in a bottle in an ocean with no hope of reaching shore except by extreme coincidence of someone stumbling on the proper mental configuration to receive it.
(Think about what the previous two sections would mean for reincarnation and for Shezarrines. Viruses indeed; the former received passively by symbolic actions, the latter shaped into symbols by information injected within the soul from the start.)
The Center
Before I go further on this one, a disclaimer: I'm not entirely clear on the symbolism of the Sermons. If the Center isn't actually to be taken as the Dreamsleeve, then just ignore this part.
But, if we do take the Center as being the Dreamsleeve, where the Amaranth sleeps and Dreams the Dream, then it's clear that would line up with this model well. The stable system of the Amaranth swims within the random noise of the Dreamsleeve. And why is it called the Center if it's outside? Well, consider the Amaranth as a point in an infinite sea of Amaranth points. When you've got an infinite expanse, where's the center of it? Everywhere. Each point has an equal distance to the infinitely distant edges of the expanse. The Center is everywhere, at the edges of everything. Around every aspect of the stable system of the Amaranth, the Center roils. In the same way, the elements of Mundus are a stable system, around which infinite Oblivion roils, at the edges of every body. Remember:
> What's across the Godhead from Anu? Other Amaranths. What's across Oblivion from Mundus? Other realms, the Princes. What's across the oceans from Tamriel? Other continents.
This brings us to:
Trans-Amaranth Travel as a Whopping Big Memospore
In Part II, I discussed Trans-Amaranth travel as making use of the symbolic ties between Amaranths, which are formed through Memory. But I wasn't very clear on the mechanics, because, at the time, I didn't have a solid idea as to how it would work.
Imagine yourself as a Trans-Amaranth traveler, and the continental symbols as giant I/O ports, matched up by their symbolic similarity. You're sailing for a distant port, more distant than anyone who doesn't understand the Godhead could realize. But what does the ocean symbolize? The Void between Amaranths, the Dreamsleeve. Crossing the ocean is integral to the process of Trans-Amaranth travel, because it symbolizes crossing the Dreamsleeve, just as the points of departure and arrival, the continents, symbolize the Amaranths.
The whole time, you're pushing this symbolism out into the the Dreamsleeve. It's forming a transient orderly system within the Dreamsleeve, a giant bolt of a memospore, a coherent beam of information that homes in on its most similar point out in the Godhead, the receiving symbol of the destination Amaranth. For the duration of the bridge, those Amaranths are joined as one, by a shining laser of ideas.
That's how you would "trick" the Godhead into placing you in both Dreams at once. You turn yourself, and your actions, and all the information contained therein, into the bridge, by sheer awareness of meaning. Again, this wouldn't happen by accident. It would require tremendous Will and enlightenment and understanding of precisely what you're doing. As /u/laurelanthalasa put it, "Serious badassery."