One of the mind training instructions is “Regard everything as a dream.”
In this passage from Wake Up to Your Life, Ken McLeod clarifies what this means, and how it relates to daily life. He begins with the reminder that we can not share experience. We can describe it to others, but the only world we can actually know is the one that appears in our own field of awareness.
From there, the instruction opens up naturally. It’s not asking us to believe that the world is unreal, or encouraging indifference or detachment. It’s reminding us to be present to what is right here right now: sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes and thoughts.
Seen this way, “regard everything as a dream” becomes a practical instruction telling us to stop projecting solidity onto what arises and reacting to those projections.
Rather than stripping away its mystery Ken has made one of the most enigmatic mind training instructions seem even more magical.
From Wake Up To Your Life, p. 339
What you experience is yours and yours alone. No one else can experience exactly what you do. Even when you express what you experience in poetry, painting, or writing, no one experiences what you experienced. The experiences elicited in them by the poetry are their experiences, not the experience that originally inspired you.
To help us awaken from the enchantment of the abstraction we call the external world, Buddhism applies a bit of common sense and calls the external world what it is—an enchantment, a dream.
The raw materials of the so-called external world are the sensory experiences that arise in awareness. To undo the obsession with the apparent reality of the external world, use the mind-training teaching
Regard everything as a dream.
When you dream, buildings, people, trees, and animals arise vividly. During the dream, you take the buildings and people to be real; that is, you regard them as an external world in which you move around. When you wake up, however, you know that the buildings and people are simply experiences that arose in the dream.
By carrying the idea that everything you experience in your waking life is like a dream, you undermine the conditioned tendency to project an external reality onto sensory experiences. In effect, you move into a more intimate relationship with sensory experience. Your experience of sensations becomes clearer and more vivid, and you are less likely to project emotional reactions onto them.
This instruction is often interpreted to mean that we should not care so much about what happens and not take things so seriously—a dangerous misinterpretation. When we regard everything that arises as a dream, we actually pay more attention to what we are experiencing and how that experience is arising. Instead of automatically interpreting sensory experience as independent objects, we perceive sensory experience for what it is—sensory experience, neither more nor less.
Habitually, we regard awareness and sensory experience as separate and different, but sensory experience cannot be separated from awareness. By cutting through the sense of separation with the instruction “everything is a dream,” we cut through the conditioning, interpretation, and reactivity that are ordinarily set in motion.
It's a dangerous business breaking enchantments. When you wake up from the dream you've been living in, there's no telling what you will do. No telling at all.
Mind you, there's no telling what you will do in your next dream, either.
—Ken McLeod, reading from An Arrow to the Heart