By Ed Kellogg (© E. W. Kellogg III, Ph.D.)

(This feature presents cutting-edge lucid dreaming tasks. Participants agree to accept personal responsibility for any risks should they choose to undertake challenges, which may bring about mental, emotional, and even physical changes. We invite those of you who try these tasks to send your dream reports to LDE. If you would like to submit an unusual lucid dreaming challenge of your own for consideration in a future issue of LDE, please contact Ed Kellogg at [email protected].)

Dream Mirrors in Theory and Practice

In ancient times, mirrors seemed rare and precious, and many cultures endowed them with magical properties. They believed that mirrors not only reflected the soul, but also had the power of retaining part of the soul of those who looked into them. Although mirrors have become inexpensive and common in modern times, some of these ancient beliefs have stayed with us, for example the common fear that breaking a mirror may bring seven years bad luck.

Whatever one believes about physical mirrors, it makes sense psychologically that dream mirrors may indeed reflect the soul, and in addition may also reveal to dreamers hidden aspects of themselves, serve as powerful mediums for obtaining important information, and act as useful portals to other dimensions and realities beyond the gates of mundane thought. For example:

Some Possible Uses of Dream Mirrors

1. As a scrying tool – to see:

A specific event in the past
A specific event in the future
As a window to see into parallel realities
As a remote viewing tool, to see events somewhere else
Personal Information

To get information on your LifePath – your mission in life, perhaps even to see your soul mate or life partner

To get healing diagnostics – to see your state of physical, emotional, mental, and even spiritual health

To get healing prescriptions – using the mirror to display information for optimizing health, or to cure disease, including what to eat – general diet, and specific foods

To see past lives, future lives, and alternate selves

Business Information:

Job Opportunities
Investment Advice

2. As a Problem Solving Tool:

As a focus to heal parts of yourself, or to invoke and interact with hidden aspects of Self, such as one’s magical child, shadow selves, other positive and negative aspects

3. As a portal to go through, or to bring things through.

Use as a “Stargate” to visit / experience other dimensions or realities

Step into a different time

Tour the Magical Multiverse – from “Neverland,” “Rivendell of Middle Earth,” “The Emerald City of Oz,”

“Hogwarts,” “The Fountain of Youth,” the “DreamTime” lands of myth and legend, to “fictional” worlds of all shapes and sizes

In your next lucid dream find a mirror (or any other reflective surface, like a pool of water, or a polished metal surface) and look for your reflection in it. You may look like your WPR (waking physical reality) self, or … you may not. Dream mirrors may provide literal or symbolic information about the physical, emotional, or spiritual state of the dreamer, or they may reflect something entirely unexpected, depending on the dreamer’s conscious intention, the environment in which they find themselves, and the influence of other forces.

Record your experiences in your dream journal afterwards in detail, including colored drawings illustrating what you see. As you write down your dreams, pay special attention to what your dream body looks like in the mirror – do you resemble your WPR self or do you look different? If different, what sort of dream body do you see? Your dream body may represent the mental image that you unconsciously hold of yourself, the underlying state of health of your physical body, or something else. Use your intuition to tune into what your dream mirror reflection represents for you.

In your next lucid dream find a mirror (or any other reflective surface, like a pool of water, or a polished metal surface) to use as a scrying tool to tune into information of interest to you, similar to the way the Magic Mirror worked in Snow White. In order to better focus your intent, you might want to create a magical chant in WPR in advance, to repeat in front of the mirror when you have a lucid dream.

For example, if you want information about your health, you might try the chant: “Mirror, mirror that I see / Show my state of health to me!” If you want to ask a more open-ended question, try: “Mirror, mirror, Above, Below / Show me what I most need to know!” (In my experience, the rhythm and rhyming of chants can make them an especially effective means of focusing intent.) After chanting I suggest looking away from the mirror for a few seconds, to give the image a chance to manifest without interference.

Record your experiences in your dream journal afterwards in detail, including colored drawings illustrating what you see. What did the mirror look like? Describe its size, shape, and any unusual optical characteristics it might have had. Perhaps you’ll find that some kinds of dream mirrors work better, or at least differently, than others. Use your intuition to tune into what the image you see in a dream mirror represents to you.

In your next lucid dream find a mirror (or any other reflective surface, like a pool of water, or a polished metal surface) to use as a portal to another world. You might want to think of the mirror as something like a “Stargate” – the dream reality version of a wormhole connecting to other worlds and parallel realities. Unless you want to trust to luck, to better focus your intent with respect to a desired destination, once again I suggest creating a magical chant in WPR in advance, to repeat in front of the mirror when you have a lucid dream.

For example, if you’d like to visit Neverland, you might try the chant: “Magic mirror that before me stands / Take me to the realm of Neverland!” After chanting, I suggest waiting a few seconds, and then to confidently, and lucidly, walk through the mirror to see where it takes you.

Record your experiences in your dream journal afterwards in detail, including colored drawings illustrating what you see. Use your intuition to identify the destination that the dream mirror brought you to.

Appendix 1: Some Examples

Comment: For better or worse, , this dream changed my life. Until this dream, I generally kept my mouth shut with respect to sharing information with others, even when I thought the information would prove useful to them and felt strongly impelled to do so. I understood my own fallibility, and this maxim from Matthew deeply resonated with me: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

After this validation that my life path as a messenger required sharing information with others, at least when I felt a strong impulse, I began to do so, while making a habit of qualifying myself, adding any necessary caveats, and to trying to stay non-attached to the results.

EWK 3 94 (Sub-lucid) “I use a mirror to see my aura, but find I must hold it very close to me to get it to work. I don’t see any colored energy bands across my face, but instead see a sort of orange energy with patterns. My Ray (the energy inflow from which the aura energy outflow around the body depends), that defines my function in life, has light blue energy in the middle, and gold energy on the outside. The cone shaped ray going in the top of my head has rings in it, and on the outside I see a sort of banner, in Old English lettering, that says Christ’s Nuts + Seeds, that confirms that I have a Second Ray function as a messenger, someone who conveys spiritual information from ‘the above to the below’. I feel glad my ray does not look visible to anyone other than a few very talented clairvoyants. . . . “

EWK 26 44 (Lucid) “ . . . I fly up a number of levels until I arrive at the top and go outside, and see what looks like a mountain top, like Mt. Fuji. I encounter a young girl there, who shows me a 7-8” mirror that represents my meditation. The images look blurred, but recognizable. She tells me that most people do not have a mirror, until after years of Zen practice. As I have a blurred mirror, she recommends that I should either have therapy (?), or take up Zen. A couple of Zen masters/teachers come up to me and serve me oriental/Chinese type food.”

I see several other transformations, and then go back to the advisory group where we have a discussion. A man shows me many pictures of myself in past lives, some apparently with him. I see a blond Scottish man, who died young, and another from Italy. . . . I tell the man I want to know my purpose in life. “Very commendable,” he says, but nothing else. A woman comes over and gives me advice about women, relationships in general, and sex.”

Comment: Mirrors as a metaphor for true Mind, and of the Buddha-nature, play an important role in a number of teaching stories, especially in the Zen tradition. For example, in the 13th passage in The Sutra of Forty-Two Sections, Buddha says, “Those who are pure in heart and single in purpose are able to understand the most supreme Way. It is like polishing a mirror, which becomes bright when the dust is removed. Remove your passions, and have no hankering, and the past will be revealed to you.” To my mind this dream used a quite novel but appropriate variation on this metaphor, in which the dream mirror congruently symbolized the qualities of my Self-Reflective meditation practice, not through its obscuration by “dust”, but by drawing attention to the reflective qualities of the mirror itself.

11 50 (Lucid) “ . . . I go down the stairs to the living room, and find a group of older English(?) men and women waiting for me. Apparently they sit on some sort of judgment or advisory panel. They direct me over to a “mirror” so that I can see my past incarnations. Looking in the mirror, I see a blue-eyed, horse-faced, lantern-jawed man, who somehow seems feminine looking. This changes into another figure, more similar to my present body. Then a woman appears, at least 9 ft. tall and of apparently another race. When I touch her breasts it feels as if I touch myself. Several more transformations . . . in one I wear a blue cloak, and a mask and hat, that together make a sort of helmet. He looks very impressive – I feel real sense of power in this one. Taking off the man’s helmet, I see a face similar to my own. . . .

Comment: Whether one believes that I experienced “past incarnations,” symbolic representations of aspects of myself, or something else in this dream, depends both on the psychological models that one subscribes to, as well as the beliefs and experiences one has as the nature of reality. For myself, based on the felt sense during the dream, I’d go with “past incarnations,” but with the caveat that these incarnations still exist in the present, at least limited way, as aspects of my psyche. Incidentally, I had this experience eight years before the movie Defending Your Life came out, which has a “A Past Life Pavilion” scene in it that very much reminds me of this lucid dream.

EWK 37 73 (Lucid) “ . . . I decide to do a healing on my teeth. I look at my face in a mirror, and point my right index finger at my teeth. I chant, “From My Hand Shines an Energy Beam / To Heal My Teeth with Power Supreme”. A white yellow light and foaming liquid projects out of the tip of my finger, and I direct it at my upper and lower teeth. My teeth look white and perfect, but I guess from the vigorous response that they really needed the cleaning and healing. The foam tastes pleasantly of lemon, like lemon yogurt.”

Comment: Lucid dream healings of oneself have become increasing commonplace, but sometimes one can’t directly see the part of the body that needs healing. However, just as with physical mirrors, dream mirrors can let one see parts of the body by reflection that one can’t see directly, allowing the dreamer to better focus their healing intent, as well as to receive visual feedback as to the effectiveness of a healing technique.

EWK 37 73 (Lucid) “ . . . I decide to do a healing on my teeth. I look at my face in a mirror, and point my right index finger at my teeth. I chant, “From My Hand Shines an Energy Beam / To Heal My Teeth with Power Supreme”. A white yellow light and foaming liquid projects out of the tip of my finger, and I direct it at my upper and lower teeth. My teeth look white and perfect, but I guess from the vigorous response that they really needed the cleaning andhealing. The foam tastes pleasantly of lemon, like lemon yogurt.”

Comment: Lucid dream healings of oneself have become increasing commonplace, but sometimes one can’t directly see the part of the body that needs healing. However, just as with physical mirrors, dream mirrors can let one see parts of the body by reflection that one can’t see directly, allowing the dreamer to better focus their healing intent, as well as to receive visual feedback as to the effectiveness of a healing technique.

EWK 39 116 (Fully Lucid) ” . . . I focus on doing the ALC (Alef Lamed Chesed) chant, trying to bring down blue Chesed-Lovingkindness regenerative energy. I look in a big mirror, and while I already have on my blue robe, to my surprise I see I wear a red robe in the mirror, worn over my red Pendleton plaid wool shirt – I look dressed all in red. I wonder at the meaning of this – does the mirror reflect the other half of the process – Geburah, and the energy of breaking down? I continue chanting ALC, and look at my image, willing/ intending blue. I begin to see changes, my clothing gets darker, and black gloves appear. I look away for a bit, then back. Now in my reflection I see I have on a deep lapis colored blue robe, a purple shirt, and that even my body has turned blue. I experiment with projecting qi gong energies from my hands, and blue lightning coronas from hand to hand, the color of Tesla’s violet ray . . . “

Comment: Sometimes dream mirrors will “reflect” something quite different than what you expect to see. Although sometimes apparently idiosyncratic, I’ve found that these differences highlight important information, allowing one to see the situation from a different, but often quite relevant, point of view.

EWK 24 49 (Lucid) ” . . . I become lucid, and while walking down a very interesting rectangular corridor, with 1930’s – 1940’s wood paneling, and many objects d’art. I intone aloud my “Mind over Matter” chant. I see a mirror and decide to use it as a portal and walk through it. After I step through, suddenly everything becomes much brighter – I enter into a large room, where everything now looks far more expensive and luxurious . . . “

Comment: Just like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, lucid dreamer’s can use mirrors as doorways into alternate realities. However, even more than Alice, where one ends up may prove quite different from what the dreamer saw reflected in it. Lucid dreamer’s can also choose, or at least intend, what sort of reality they want to go through to, by focusing their intent, for example through chants or affirmations, before passing through.