You keep mentioning Occam's Razor. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Occam's razor means that based on a given problem, the simplest solution is usually correct. That is my understanding. I agree with you that it could not be applied
within the fantasy world of TC's Haven Farm, but we, outside of this world looking in and discussing whether the Land is Real or Not based on evidence that the writer shows us (as well as his later musings), apply it because that is how we (the intended reader) do logic. I do think it is appropriate; I guess you disagree, and that's fine. This is my take on it.
Do you at least understand what I mean?
edit:
But that aside, I am reduced to stumpednation as to how the Land being a dream requires more assumptions than the Land being real!!!
OK I will try to explain:
My basic premises
1. The Land is self contained, whatever form it takes.
2. The land is not a single user dream.
The Land is self contained: It has a past, present and future. It has plants and animals and trees and beings and geography and a beginning. It has these things in some form, whether it is a dream or a place. Lets call all of the data in the Land, including all history and peoples and physical features, etc - lets call that X.
If the Land is real, is corporeal, exists as a place, then it is be self contained, and all the people and events, past and present in the Land are held there, and can thereby be independantly experienced by visitors, such as TC, Linden and Hile. In other words, X has one place to be; X is a one-to-many relationship with its visitors.
The only problem is translating TC and others to the Land from the world of TC. They all experience any of the dataset X they are confronted with. There is no 'data synchronization' problem of getting multiple people to have similar experiences; however these experiences are only just a small percentage of the total information stored in X. Lets call TC's experiences in the Land, the data of the Land he has experiences TCx , Lindens LAx, and Hile's HTx, etc.
The same can be said of a single person dreaming all of the events. If the Land is all in one persons dream, Then X is completely contained in that one person's dream, and we are satisfied. But this isn't so.
If the Land is a dream,
it cannot be a single person's dream such as this. I say this because SRD has said as much; If he hadn't, then it could be one long dream by TC, and Linden and Hile are not real, or are not actual participants in TC's dream. I think this (not a single dreamer) is also supported by the fact that TC is dead in his own world; I see no evidence that dead people can dream in TC's world, so the dream would then have to be passed on to someone else after he died, which means Linden would also have to be both real
and a participant in the original dream.
But this isn't the case as I have said, and I don't think anyone could argue effectively to me that the Land is a Single user dream, with no one else experiencing it; rather, it would have to be a dream which many people can participate in and be physically affected by, such as Hile, Linden, TC, the children of retribution, Roger, and Joan. This is in conflict with the self-containment premise I hold.
Then there is the problem with Foul and the Creator affecting the real world of Covenant, or at least the dream world of multiple participants in the same way; the avatar of the creator approaches Linden and Covenant; Foul affects the weather and causes lightning in the TC world that Linden, Roger, Sherrif Litton, and others also see. There is some form of communication with the children of retribution by Foul, SO now they must also be sharing in the dreaming. Then there is the problem of differing experiences of Linden and TC, and the history of the Land. With multiple dreamers, there is no one place to hold all of this information (X) to be experienced by different people. Either that, or we have to have synchronized dreaming. Could all of this be part of the fantasy world: of course it could. But ,
looking in from the outside, I think it is pertinent to apply the Razor to this and say a real Land makes a lot more sense to me.
in other words, X has no
single place to be in a multiple user dream, and therefore we have a lot of problems synchronizing data, and then there is all of the data not yet experienced by the visitors, such as the past. This is a many-to-many rleationships, where X has to be distributed and synchronized to satisfy the independant observations by different visitors.
Well, I have probably confused more than satisfied, but I lack the means to express it another way. I am thinking in terms of software development, and that is probably my problem, at heart, i am too logical for this conversation.
I would like to point out again that I said SRD has not, and will likely not give us the direct evidence; I take my stand based soley on what I read in the books and also the Author's comments, which is done based on the evidence presented.
Wayfriend, is your stance that either side is not defendable, that it is intentionally left unresolvable by the Author? you tend to take both sides in different arguments, IMO. Also, how can you state TC is not an Avatar?