In the epic early 1990s game “The of Legend Zelda: A Link to the Past” the protagonist Link has to make his way through different castles and lands, on his quest to defeat the evil wizard and free mystical Hyrule. One of the most important devices he has is a mirror. It lets him travel from the parallel world of shadows and darkness that is superimposed back to the regular world. Things look the same and different in the shadow world. Creatures have different shapes, the plants have different structures, and the colors are off. But at the same time the outlines and structures of the map are familiar. The mirror is a form of transportation here.
In George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), the protagonist spends time at a library in Faërie and reads the story about Cosmo, a student from Prague, who buys a magical mirror that changes his world, creating a copy with new players in it.
A few years later Alice climbs through the looking glass into a world that is upside down, not only in looks but also in logic.
Mirrors in that context are not only a quick place to check your reflection, but an extension of our world and reality.
In the case of Snow White and the Queen, the mirror also becomes a tool that looks further back into the world it reflects, past the room into all the lands.
From looking into pools and polished stones to the displays of smartphones that show our image after being rendered by cameras, the image is always a distortion of reality. There is no perfect reflection; something might be hiding behind what is actually shown and comes to light only once the mirror is shattered.
While sitting at the pond, Narcissus catches his reflection in the water and becomes mesmerized with his own image. The urge to look back and document is engraved many billions of times in countless selfies on cloud servers all over the planet. Most of the time, when we look at things now, it is the reflective image of other people. Talking to a virtual mirror that happens to open to the world.
Both servers and mirrors have in common that they are, at the core, polished forms of sand, brought to perfection by polishing.
Most often, in movies, books, and games, the mirror world fades away or is shattered in the end. The traveler returns to the world the mirror was built in and looks somewhere else.
And often, whatever is made of sand, eventually crumbles back to the sea.