I had the opposite view of the WO Dreamwalkers vs the Wolves in the Wolf-dream - Edit 3
Before modification by RugbyPlayingAshaman at 04/01/2011 05:19:43 PM
Mesaana about the a'dam etc. just didn't work for me, and felt almost comedic, where the villain or hero start talking to his foe and gets foiled. It would have worked much better had Egwene simply realized this in her head and struck without warning. The whole episode left me a bit cold. I didn't really liked how in Brandon's hands Egwene seemed to regress in her TAR skills, though I start to get the feeling that in Jordan's mind she and the WO were not meant to be TAR super-fighters, that the lethal TAR killers he had in mind are to be Perrin and the wolves (and that dead wolves are in TAR as guardians/hunters). Egwene and the WO's real skills are in other areas. I also get more and more the feeling that some revelation is coming about the real speculated purpose of TAR in the cosmologt. I think it's more and more obvious a dreamwalker or Dreamer is meant to be onobstrusive, and that there are several things which are "unethical" to do in TAR, in the sense that it interferes with the Wheel or the real purpose of TAR. Entering in the flesh as if it were the real world seems to be one of those, and tampering with people's dreams in harmful ways, creating mass nightmares, killing people or animals in TAR etc. are all "evil". The wolves seem to think this way: they could hunt, but they should not kill in TAR. Egwene's skills (and the WO) seems to come from passivity/receptivity/contemplation/introspection, and more and more I wonder if holding to a non-obstrusive/ethical attitude in their interaction with TAR doesn't play a big role in a Dreamer's skills, a kind of sine qua non condition to increasing your oracular skills.
The impression I always got was that the wolves used the wolfdream to hunt, but weren't especially lethal in it. They seemed to be intuitively one with the Dream, but not necessarily more powerful - they were still animalistic in their use of it, and thus, limited in a place that reflected conscious thought and will.
It seemed to me that the Wise Ones and Dreamwalkers were of such a greater order of magnitude more powerful than the wolves due to their human consciousness that there really isn't a comparison. A single, relatively single-minded Dreamer (Slayer) was easily a match for multiple wolves and that destroyed any concept that they were a match for a human in this arena. While certain activities in T'A'R could be considered unethical for the Wise Ones, that doesn't negate their tactical capability to use these powers.
I got the exact opposite view from the series overall: the wolves were meant to counter the darkhounds in the Wolfdream since the darkhounds are so much more powerful in the real world, while any large-scale, human battles in Tel'Aran'Rhiod were meant to be fought by the Wise Ones. In some ways, the Wise Ones surrounded T'A'R with prohibitions that Egwene has to work around in order to re-discover Skimming, increase her mastery of it and bring her skill level closer to the Forsaken and beyond the Wise Ones. As we've seen, though the Wise Ones had superior experience and tactics, Egwene ended up destroying an enemy they might not have been able to defeat.