Have you ever dreamed that you looked at yourself in a mirror and noticed you were quite different from the way you think of yourself in waking life? 

While we look in a mirror in some of our dreams, the dream is also looking at us. The whole of a dream may function as a mirror in a larger sense, showing us sides of ourselves and our behavior that we may prefer not to see or that we have simply shut out, in ordinary reality.

A great game to play with many dreams is to compare the behavior of our dream self with our waking self. If you are wimping out of situations in your dreams, passively following courses others set for you, or tending to remain an observer when action might be desirable, then you’ll want to ask yourself where, in your waking life, you have a tendency to behave that way. If you dream that you are forever catching a bus (a collective vehicle that runs according to other people’s schedules and makes lots of stops that have no interest for you), you may want to ask yourself how often in waking life you submit to agendas that are not of your making and which don’t allow you to give your best.

Alternatively, if you find you have strength and magical powers in your dreams that you generally do not exhibit in waking life, you’ll want to try to reach into the dreamspace and bring those powers through, to work for you in your physical life.

If what we see in the mirror of dreams sometimes seems like a carnival freak show or the work of a Hollywood special-effects crew, it’s because we’ve failed to look at something we need to see. The drama and the magnification in our dreams ensure that we pay closer attention.

Magnifying-mirror dreams often show us strong emotions moving with the power of natural forces — rage or grief may erupt like a volcano, tear up the neighborhood like a twister, or drown the whole scene like a tsunami. Working with such dreams, we want to remember that they may relate both to a literal phenomenon and to an emotional or symbolic condition. Indeed, sometimes a dream previews a literal event that will also have great symbolic resonance for the dreamer. We need to take dreams more literally and the events of waking life more symbolically.

Adapted from The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (New World Library) by Robert Moss. 

18th century Miroir de toilette made for the Princesse de Deux-Ponts