Finally, while the idea that one can never see their reflection in a mirror is technically a myth, the reality is that the reflection observed is almost always significantly distorted. Dreamers report seeing their face as changed, warped, older, younger, or even replaced by the face of another person. The precise cause is still debated, but researchers propose that, similar to text and numbers, the complex and intricate details of one's own face cannot be accurately or stably reconstructed by the brain in the dream state. Just as the dreaming mind fails to generate a fixed page of text, it struggles to recreate the detailed, self-referential image of one's face. Collectively, these five phenomena—the missing mobile phone, the illegible text, the unstable numbers, the absent smell and taste, and the distorted reflection—underscore that the content of our dreams is heavily filtered, driven by evolutionary priorities and the functional limitations of the brain's cognitive hardware during sleep.
