Dreaming about
a mirror

A mirror is how we check ourselves before anyone else sees us, the last look before a date, an interview or a funeral. Dreaming about a mirror usually brings up that check. It's about how you see yourself, and how you think other people see you, and when the mirror misbehaves, cracking, going blank or showing a face that isn't yours, it's about a sense of self that feels shaken.

What you saw in the glass is nearly all of it. A familiar face looking back calmly is a different dream from a reflection that moves a second late, and a broken mirror carries a superstition with it. How you felt looking, and what has changed in your life or your body lately, are where your own meaning starts.

What dreaming about a mirror means

Mirrors have always been a little uncanny, and dreams use them in three main ways.

How you see yourself

Looking in a mirror in a dream is self-reflection made literal, so notice your eyes, your hair, your age, your clothes. A dream where you look better than you expected can be about growing confidence, and one where you look older, tired or strange can be about a worry you haven't voiced, about aging, health or how others judge you.

How others see you

Mirrors are also about being seen. Getting ready in front of a mirror for an event, or checking your reflection over and over, can be about wanting to make a certain impression, or fearing you won't.

A truth you'd rather not face

"Take a long look in the mirror" means face up to your own part in something. A mirror dream can put you in front of a truth about yourself, a habit, a mistake, a way you treat someone. If you looked away, that's worth noticing.

Dreaming about looking in the mirror

Looking at yourself in a mirror is the most common version. If the face was yours and you felt calm, the dream may be about self-acceptance, or simply a moment of taking stock. If something was off, a scar, gray hair, a younger or older you, ask what that detail has to do with how you feel right now.

Dreaming about a broken mirror

A cracked or shattered mirror is a self-image that has taken a knock. It often comes after a breakup, a job loss, an illness or a change in how you look. The old superstition says a broken mirror means seven years of bad luck, and the dream may borrow that dread, but it reflects how you feel about yourself, not a run of misfortune ahead. A fractured reflection, your face split across pieces, can be about feeling pulled in different directions.

Dreaming about no reflection in the mirror

Looking into a mirror and seeing nothing, or only the room behind you, is unsettling. In Bram Stoker's Dracula the count casts no reflection, and the dream can carry that horror-film chill. Usually it's about losing track of who you are, during burnout, after shaping yourself around someone else for too long, or in a big transition where the old you doesn't fit and the new one isn't there yet.

Dreaming about a reflection that isn't you

A reflection that moves on its own, smiles when you don't, or shows a different face is one of the eeriest mirror dreams. It's usually about a part of you acting independently, a feeling you haven't owned, a side of yourself you don't recognize. If the face was someone else's, a parent, an ex, a stranger, the dream may be about how much of them you see in yourself. It sits close to dreams of a clone or a double.

Dreaming about a mirror according to Jung and Freud

You won't find a mirror in either man's symbol list, so this is their thinking turned toward the glass.

Jung: the shadow in the glass

Jung called the side of yourself you've disowned the shadow, and expected to meet it in dreams as someone of your own sex.^[1] A reflection always has your sex and your face, so one that smiles when you don't, or turns away as you look, reads naturally as that disowned side taking a turn at being you. That reading is ours, not Jung's. His advice about the shadow was to get to know it, which here means asking the reflection what it's doing.

Freud: the face you'd like to see

Freud treated a dream as a wish in costume, and asked for the dreamer's own words about an image before reaching for any symbol list.^[2] A reflection better looking than you expected needs almost no costume, since it grants about the simplest wish a dream can, to be the person in the glass. The mirror that cracked before a wedding grants nothing at first sight, so his method would send you to what the crack, the room and the occasion remind you of, and to whose eyes you were checking your face for. He left no reading of mirrors, so this is only his method.

Other readings

Calvin Hall, an American psychologist who tallied the contents of thousands of dreams, went as far as calling a dream a mirror of the dreamer's self-conceptions.^[3] Read his way, a cracked, older or blank reflection shows how you see yourself right now, and not what anyone else sees.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of a mirror in dreams

The mirror in 1 Corinthians

Paul's line in 1 Corinthians, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face", is about the same gap between what we see and what's there.^[4] Mirrors in his day were polished metal and gave a dim picture, and his point was that we only know ourselves in part. In Jewish homes in mourning, mirrors are traditionally covered.

Questions to ask about your mirror dream

Look back at the glass and ask what it showed you.

• Was the reflection yours, and did it look like you?
• Was the mirror whole, cracked or blank?
• Where was it, and whose house?
• How did you feel looking, and did you look away?
• What has changed lately in how you see yourself?

Oniri asks you what the glass showed and how it felt before it reads your dream, because two people can see very different things in the same mirror. And if mirror dreams keep frightening you awake, these tips for fewer nightmares can help.