Mirror

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.

Mirrors were divinatory instruments long before they were furniture. Catoptromancy, scrying by mirror, runs from the ancient world through Renaissance magic, and folk practice kept mirror divination alive at the domestic level, the girl who looks in the glass by candlelight to see a future husband. The superstitions travelled with the practice: the broken mirror's seven years of ill luck, and the custom of covering mirrors in a house of mourning, kept the glass charged as an object where seeing and fate touch. A dream mirror inherits all of it.

The old handbooks read the reflection by its fidelity, a true likeness one way, a distorted, aged or absent one another, and that instinct persists in the modern reported forms: the reflection that does not match, that moves independently, that shows another face or none. Interpreters across the psychological schools read these toward self image and its shocks, the gap between the self as lived and the self as seen.

The Jungian tradition gives the image its strongest modern frame, the mirror as the first test on the way into the unconscious: what looks back at the threshold is the shadow, everything the dreamer is and prefers not to see. Whoever will not face the reflection, that school holds, gets no further. The reading is Jungian doctrine, recorded here as such, and the older folk registers run happily on beside it.