Ashlanders worship their ancestors' spirits, right? So if when you die your spirit becomes a "blank slate" in the DreamSleeve, then how can anybody possibly worship your spirit when it's been wiped away in the dreamsleeve? I don't see how that can work.

Because worshipping doesn't require the person being worshipped to really reciprocate anything. The spirits don't necessarily do anything, the ashlanders just pray to them.

The whole Dreamsleeve isn't common knowledge to people in TES. The ashlanders just believe that their ancestors are floating around watching out for them; doesn't mean that's actually the case.

One might say that the advantage of living any mixed ball of schizophrenia is that it doesn't matter, if the person you want to talk to is someone else.

Also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BellisariosMaxim

Ah, so it's not like Ashlanders see their spirits and commune with them or anything. It's kinda like how here on earth, people pray to God or Buddha or whoever without actually physically seeing or having a conversation with him. So Ashlanders simply do their ritual stuff and just assume that their ancestors can hear them or are acknowledging their praise even though they're not because once you die, your specific personality and spirit are no longer in existence.

Sure they can see them. What kinda world would that be where you can't talk to your ancestors in person? Like I said, mad ball of schizophrenia. When you get down to it people aren't discrete units any more. Which was the whole point of being able to talk to other people using the dreamsleeve in the first place.

So you're saying everyone's soul is just recycled from someone else? So their ancestors' souls would be alive in a different body? The original thing of the Dreamsleeve was a communication device, after all, but the exact nature of it seems hazy. At least, it does to me :blink:

No, the Ashlanders do see their spirits and commune with them, they even talk with them (see http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/ancestor.shtml).

"The departed spirits of the Dunmeri, and perhaps those of all races, persist after death... The bond between the living family members and immortal ancestors is partly blood, partly ritual, partly volitional. A member brought into the House through marriage binds himself through ritual and oath into the clan, and gains communication and benefits from the clan's ancestors...

Each residence has a family shrine. In poorer homes... This shrine is called the Waiting Door, and represents the door to Oblivion.

It is a family's most solemn duty to make sure their ancestor's remains are interred properly in a City of the Dead such as Necrom. Here the spirits draw comfort from one another against the chill of the mortal world... These remains become a beacon and focus for ancestral spirits, and for the spirit of the remains in particular. "http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/ancestor.shtml

Its quite possible that the Dunmer religion has managed to circumvent the dreamsleeve process to some degree through the bonds of ritual, oath, choice, the power of myth, and internment either in Necrom, an ancestral tomb or a burial cavern. In accordance with "reappropriation of spirit towards its aligned AE" the Dunmer spirits enter into this ancestral bond. Spirits can be forced to remain in the world, the spiritual bonds of their religion seems to have accomplished this as the norm for the Dunmer race.

Granted: "Recently dead spirits know us well, and do not quickly forget their living kin; they are weak, but quick to guide and protect us." That ancestors know the world better immediately after their death might imply that even in their ancestor state they are subject to the dreamsleeve erasure, or this might just be the natural effect of being less connected to the world.

Okay. Think about it this way. What ever you've read about the Dreamsleeve being afterlife a short version of what the Dreamsleeve is. It's one of it's functions. The Dreemsleeve is that which every person is attached too. Kinda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbelith from the invisible. It is a special kind of divinity, a special kind of personality for Nirn. It's mad and insane. Each person or rather everything with a soul is an expression of it. When things die, that is what they return to. Pull out something new and it's going to be a blank slate.

So when you want to settle who gets the dog with you grandfather after he died, you pull that old identity out. It's like calling up a memory. It might degrade, it might be forgotten, it might might be used in other people but the parts are still there. Combine all that with a slightly bendable reality and you've got your grandfather.

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To make it even better. Even you're dead you can continue to do things. You're still that part of that special personality. That is, if don't believe in some afterlife and get drunk in some mythic Nordic drinking hall. I reckon the guy who came up with afterlife really got tired of being nagged by his grandparents all the time. But you can insert your own conspiracy here.

Anyway for Dunmer the afterlife consists of watching over the kids, that's what they believe and that's what they do.

So then are the ghosts, wraiths and ghouls we see in game supposed to be blank slates or people that have died and couldn't quite make it over to the dreamsleeve, and are therefore trapped between Mundus and the Dreamsleeve until they are killed by the PC, which would then send them completely over to Dreamsleeve?

You're still that part of that special personality.

and so you remain, in memory

Pay attention to links, read http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/ancestor.shtml.

They are either bound to Nirn or have some other reason for sticking around. Its not completely mapped out, most reasons that folks give in real life for ghosts sticking around can probably be applied to TES as well - there are hauntings in TES. As I mentioned before for some reason they seem to lose their memories (personalities) with time, possibly some effect of the dreamsleeve. There are always exceptions.