seeing things as dreamlike

 I came across the following lines in the Surangama Sutra, as Manjushri is describing to Ananda the method of turning the hearing inward to perceive the sounds. Manjushri remarks,

In perfect purity, the brilliance of awareness shines
Unhindered and in still illumination of all space,
In contemplating worldly things as the events of dreams,
The young Matanga woman was a figure in a dream
Just who was really there with power to entice you? (p.255)

In this passage, Manjushri suggests that when a being has turned all faculties to contemplating one inward sense (such as sound), everything outward appears as though in a dream. Knowing that it's a dream, a person is no longer so enticed by worldly addictions or attractions. It truly opens the possibility of living in a detached way, but I also believe there is a tenderness in this statement. Knowing that things are so dreamlike can open the possibility of love, of tenderness and adventure. It isn't that a person loses those beautiful emotions. Rather, those emotions are supplemented with the awareness that the things are always changing. To behold that in some ways is to see something miraculous, and to ask for the first time: why is all this here and how did it ever come to be? That sense  of wonder of not knowing what the world is all about, yet feeling a part of it, is perhaps the essence of the figure in the dream.
     Although the joy can be short lived and illusory,  isn't hardship also the same? I have come to see that both dimensions of joy and pain belong in this perspective of life. But sometimes the approach has been to assume that Ananda is  being advised to suppress or deny the things of the world.. It is perhaps a different perspective to ask, where do these phenomena truly come from? What are they here to show me? Isn't even the craziest energy just a teacher in disguise, waiting for  a person to realize where it all comes from? But because of the habitual tendency to assign things to like and dislike and personal gain, the energy remains untransformed, and the dream looks and feels so 'real'. But without that sense of struggle, one can love the totality of the dream in a gentle way and embrace its possibilities.

Surangama Sutra: A New Translation: