Ah.. I wasn't yelling at you^^; In general, I'm using large letters and embolden parts for emphasis, or to underline something interesting, not to yell at people. I sometimes forget that people read that as yelling, so my apologies.
I could be reading too much into this. There are hints that he could just have been exactly as he says he is: that he was born in a small village, "there was little to interest a young man, especially one gifted with magic," and he took to exploring the Fade in sleep and dreams because it was filled with more wonders than he ever could have experienced awake. That he learned to dream freely through practice, but he prefers the Fade and now feels more comfortable there because he's been there so long.
However, I don't want to completely discount the spirit theory in case there's any truth to it. The devs have also not been very subtle about how "not so different" spirits of Wisdom and Pride are, and how Solas' wisdom is only matched by his pride. And how some of Cole's seemingly random comments that in that Solas might be more than he seems. Cole: "He calls himself Pride." Those who know the Fen'Harel thing and elvish word for pride might think, "Oh, Solas is an alias." But then in Trespasser the Dread Wolf says "I was Solas first. Fen'Harel came later." Which left me (the player) wondering, "Wait, how did he call himself 'Pride' then?"
Yes but... I didn't say Solas isn't a spirit - I'm simply saying that everyone is one, or at least began as one. The fact that he calls himself Solas/Pride points to him probably beginning as spirit of Wisdom, but he's been Solas/elf for probably very long, and likely prior to meeting Mythal.
Also - don't forget that Cole calls Cassandra Faith and Solas says that her faith defines her: that itself should tell us a lot about origin of not just elves, but likely all living beings.
....That of course leaves us with an interesting question - what spirit does Inquisitor embodies/began as? I put my bet on Hope.
It's said in "world of Thedas, vol. 1" that spirits of hope are most powerful spirits categorized as benevolent, but are exceedingly rare and hardly ever manifest out of the Fade, because there's rarely anything in physical world that interests them... Maybe this is what baffles Solas so much in Quizzy, or why he says that Lavellan's spirit is so rare and marvellous?
Not just because approved Quizzies prove that they're more than what Solas thought could manifest in the real world, but that they manifested at all an retained their 'purity' and effect on people, giving them hope.
It would make it all even more poignant, TBH - why he wants to protect elven Inquisitor from inevitable corruption he expects to befall on himself while he puts his plan of restoring elven people to life (and do so in a similar fashion he wants to protect Cole!), why he wants to keep them away from himself (to stop infecting him with hope for redemption or hope for this world), or why he wants Inquisitor to prove him wrong, by giving people will and hope to fight back.
In Trespasser, Cole also randomly mentions something about how "he didn't want to be made real, and 'she' pulled him through, and he burned her vallaslin off his face." He may or may not be talking about Solas there, and 'she' may or may not be Mythal, but I don't want to discard it out of hand, especially since Cole says that shortly after we learn that the Dread Wolf went around removing vallaslin from people's faces (if we brought Cole in the party).
The Cole's quote is actually "He did not want a body, but she asked him to come. He left a scar wen he burned her of his face" - it does imply that someone convinced someone else to manifest out of the Fade, but everything else is a guess. A rather interesting and suggestive guess (that it was Mythal and he burned off her vallaslin), but not necessarily 100% accurate.
I mean, the fact that he didn't want a body doesn't mean that he didn't have it, just that he wasn't overly-interested with it - after all, he tells to Lavellan "In all my journeys, I never thought I'd meet someone who would turn my attention from the Fade". So he was pretty absorbed with the Fade, even though he had a body, during DAI, but Lavellan - similarly to Mythal - managed to shift his attention back to physical world.