In Lojong Buddhism what is meant by "treat all physical phenomenon as a dream"?

Well I’m not sure exactly about Lojong specifically but Buddhists and Hindus alike believe that this world, the world we live in, the physical world, is merely an illusion, and we are aiming to escape the illusion to attain Nirvana in the case of Buddhism and Moksha in the case of Hinduism, which is when everything becomes clear and we become enlightened.

Dreams are illusions, they are not real, therefore they are like the illusion of the physical world. So in Buddhism you must always remember that we are in an illusion and not to get attached to anything in this physical world because it is only an illusion keeping us from attaining Nirvana.

All experience is just input from your senses being fed to your brain. Your senses can deceive you.

Some Buddhists train themselves in lucid dreaming in order to help themselves realize this. My first lucid dream was one of the craziest and most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had. I hadn’t realized how realistic dreams were before that. It’s just like being awake. You feel your feet on the ground, you hear background noise, you feel breezes against your skin. And after you wake up you can’t be sure whether the world you are in is the “real” world or not. In otherwise, there is no real difference. Both dreams and waking life are illusions. There is no truth to the physical world. You must transcend it.

What happens in dreams? Things are weird. They don’t make sense. You run and run, and never get any farther from your pursuer. Is this real? We don’t think so when we wake up.

The so-called real world is also confusing. Our senses, it turns out, are unreliable. We see maybe ten per cent of what is out there, and our minds fill in the rest. It probably happens often that our minds do it wrong. Most of the time it doesn’t matter.

However, we would do well to be suspicious of our senses in the “real” world, the same as in a dream world. Things are not as they seem, especially, as Wallace Steven wrote in a poem, when played upon the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (excerpts)

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

——————————-

You see?

Have you ever seen that Keanu Reeves movie, The Matrix? (I mean the first one, I’ve never seen the others.)

My guess is that it’s something like that – only by escaping the illusion/dream, you get to Enlightenment and Nirvana instead of Zion.

Good call, Laureth

In this respect, Lujong is no different from other schools of Buddhism. This teaching is rooted in the fundamental principles of impermanence and non-attachment.

Impermanence means that things have no essence, no intrinsic identity, that carries over from one moment to the next. We assume that our selves and the people and objects in our lives remain, in some sense, the same through time, so that we can attach discreet identities to them that will follow them through the passage of time. But Buddhism teaches that fundamentally this continuity is only an illusion; not a single thing passes from one instant to the next, so things and selves are as ephemeral as dreams.

Non-attachment is the necessary corollary to impermanence. Living as if things (including our selves) have enduring reality is the root cause of suffering. We then form attachments to illusions that cannot endure. This would be like wanting the objects of our dreams to go on and on, and being heartbroken when those dream objects vanish, as they must.