Dreams about mirror: Jung, traditions and semiotics

This is not a dream dictionary. Each perspective below names where it comes from; traditions are shown side by side, not merged into one meaning.

Start with yourself

What did the mirror show — you as you are, someone else, or nothing at all? How did you feel looking?

Jung · Meeting oneself

Jung wrote that whoever looks into the mirror of the water first sees their own face — the meeting with oneself, which he linked to the shadow, comes before anything deeper.

Was the face in the mirror kinder, harsher, older or younger than you expected?

C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i

Traditions, side by side

Roman poetry Literature

Ovid’s Narcissus falls for a reflection in a pool without knowing it is himself.

Ovid, Metamorphoses III

Chinese fiction Literature

In Dream of the Red Chamber, the “Precious Mirror of Romance” shows a beauty on one side and a skeleton on the other; the man who keeps looking at the wrong side dies of it.

Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 12

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

Following C. S. Peirce, an image can work as a sign in three ways:

Icon — by resemblance
Does the mirror look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory?
Index — by connection
Could the mirror point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day?
Symbol — by convention
Does the mirror mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?

C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.247–249 (icon, index, symbol)
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), “Definitions: Symbol” — a sign stands for something known, a symbol for something not yet fully known
Ellis (1911), ch. II, on verbal links between dream images

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Recorded dreams with mirror

As in a mirror, as in a dream Ancient India · c. 5th c. BCE (text)
Like the bronze skeleton at Delphi Delphi, Phocis · 351 BCE
Six mirrors in the barber’s shop Tokyo, Japan · 1908