A woman (Maya Deren) notices someone on the street as she walks back to her home. She enters her room and falls asleep in a chair. As soon as she drifts off, she experiences a dream in which she repeatedly tries to chase a mysterious hooded figure with a mirror for a face but is unable to catch it. With each failed attempt, she re-enters her house and encounters numerous household objects, including a key, a bread knife, a flower, a telephone, and a phonograph. The woman follows the hooded figure to her bedroom, where she sees the figure hide the knife under a pillow. Throughout the film, she witnesses multiple versions of herself, each representing fragments of the dream she has already experienced.
In one instance, the woman attempts to kill her sleeping body with the knife but is abruptly awakened by a man (Alexandr Hackenschmied). The man leads her to the bedroom, and she realizes that everything she saw in the dream was actually happening. She notices that the man’s posture resembles that of the hooded figure when it hid the knife under the pillow. She tries to injure him but fails.
Towards the end of the film, the man walks into the house and sees a broken mirror being dropped onto wet ground. He then finds the woman in the chair, who was previously asleep but is now dead.
The film’s narrative is circular, repeating several motifs: a flower on a long driveway, a falling key, an unlocked door, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook, and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film portrays a world in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from illusion.