“You can’t have a mirror in front of your bed because if you wake up and you see your reflection, the mirror will steal your soul.”

My informant heard this from her Chinese mother when trying to orient the furniture in her room.  Though my informant does not really believe that you will lose your soul to the mirror—as if in some Twilight Zone death-trap—she thinks even just waking up to your own reflection first thing in the morning is scary enough.  She did not know the reason that this is believed to happen in Chinese culture, but my own personal suspicion is that when a person first wakes up—often drowsy and not fully awake—he or she is drifting between states of consciousness and unconsciousness.  This is the liminal space around which the folk belief is based.  Should someone wake up and not be fully conscious, the mirror, which will have a duplicate image of a person, a seeming entrance way into a parallel universe, will have the ability to steal your soul during this period of a person’s vulnerable moments where the soul is between dream-state and real world-state.