16/05/2022
• What does it mean to see yourself on a mirror in a dream?
I’ve had dreams, especially during traumatic periods of my life, where I have looked in mirrors and sometimes seen another person who then transforms into my own image. I think that because all humans look at themselves in the mirror, at least some of the time, that looking at yourself in a mirror is a type of cultural meme, or behaviour that is passed from one person to another similar to the way genes are passed down. As such, looking in a mirror is a part of our culture, and probably of all cultures. We look at ourselves to try to know ourselves better. Apparently, the only other animal on earth that is able to recognise itself in the mirror is the chimpanzee. If you believe in evolutionary theory, then humans, as the most sophisticated ‘animals’ on the planet, are self-aware, and looking in a mirror is an act of self-awareness.
Having said this, dreams can function so as to filter, sort and store recent memories into our past, or to store significant events, or even to recall significant events from the past. Because dreams follow a narrative schema, they require a context, or environment, and this environment most times will mimic our actual waking world. So to see yourself in a mirror could be just a consolidation of a recent memory, perhaps the memory became associated with an emotion that day that triggered the incident in your dream. Activation Synthesis Hypothesis states that dreams reflect the processes of the brain as it tries to make sense of all the physical and cognitive stimuli it receives during the day, and the random firing of neural pathways in the brain will cause the emergence of a certain image, or memory, or narrative storyline in our dreams.
On a deeper level, if you follow psychoanalytic theory based on Sigmund Freud’s beliefs, our dreams often express our unconscious desires, motivations, fears and other aspects of our personalities hidden from our conscious minds. Perhaps your dream is expressing a desire to appreciate yourself, to know who you are, to recognise yourself and assert your own individuality.
Thanks very much for your question.