In the interpretation of dreams, Mirror is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as self-image, reflection, truth, and how one sees oneself.
Common readings
The mirror is read as a confrontation with the self-image, sometimes a truthful one and sometimes a distorted or feared one.
Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings
No old interpretive tradition treats the mirror as a stable dream sign; its symbolic charge is carried by myth and custom rather than any dream-key literature. The Greek myth of Narcissus wasting before his own reflection in water, not a manufactured mirror, still shaped later readings of mirror imagery as a caution against self-absorption, while Aztec religion gave genuine ritual weight to obsidian mirrors associated with Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," used for divination, a waking practice later writers on symbolism borrow from freely. The custom of covering mirrors in a house of mourning, observed in Jewish practice and other cultures in different forms, reflects unease about mirrors near the dead rather than any claim about a dream mirror's meaning.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.