You raise an interesting possibility - Edit 1
Before modification by guttering flame at 03/12/2010 06:48:51 AM
All right, that would be reasonable. But Wolf souls die for good in the Dreamworld because that's where dead wolves go. Aside from Heroes of the Horn, dead humans don't go to the Dreamworld, do they?
RJ said there's an afterworld where souls go to await rebirth. If it's TAR for humans too, it's not in the same dimension of TAR.
Hopper had no idea where humans go.
My hunch is that wolfbrothers become wolves in TAR after they die however, so perhaps Hopper's warning is true enough for Perrin. It may also be true if you die in TAR while there in the flesh. Perhaps your soul then becomes "lost", unable to reach the "soul pool".
Hopper may be quite wrong too, even about the wolves. Perhaps the wolves that die in TAR simply stop being reincarnated as wolves to rejoin the soul pool, and that's why the wolves believe these souls have died the final death (perhaps the souls of those wolves that died in TAR when they are reborn as human become wolfbrothers?). As RJ pointed out, souls are immortal - not even balefire can destroy them. It's very curious that dying in TAR while not incarnated (or even when incarnated) would destroy your soul. I suspect only Shai'tan can destroy souls.
Depending if Rand literally "dies" or not, I guess we might learn more about the afterlife in the last book.
But both the wolves and the Heroes of the Horns say how final death in TAR is for them.
If they're both wrong than I'm wrong but if they're right I should be right about the human dreamers as well. TAR seems to have a lot of subsections. A part that reflects the real world, a part that houses the Heroes of the Horn, a part that looks like the eternal hunting grounds, parts reflecting other worlds and so forth. Soul-pool should be a part of it as well. Non-heroic humans shouldn't be a unique phenomenon among all other living beings.