Compass

Your attempt to find a direction or activity you feel confident about. Or your attempt to decide what is the best direction to take. It might even express feelings of being lost, and trying to get your bearing or know where you are in life. The ability to continue in the face of confusing outer events. So it can express your instincts or intuition.

A compass can also be about orientation in another way. By being clear about the character and nature of those around you, or the nature of what you are involved in, and also being clear about what your own stance, qualities and weaknesses are, you can better deal with whatever you face. So the dream compass may be clarifying those sort of issues.

The circular nature of the compass, and the fourfold points it indicates are also an archetypal symbol of wholeness. It includes the light and the dark, the cold and the hot, the lower and the higher in what it indicates about our own nature. Such circles existed in most ancient cultures. This meaning is held in the word ‘encompass’. See: north, east, south and west; mandala.

From this wholeness we all have an inbuilt sense of direction in regard to our innate qualities and motivating passions, but this may have been corrupted by education, parents and authority figures criticising or giving counter directions. So the compass may depict this, as in the example below.

Example: I dreamt my watch was a compass. The second hand was the pointer. I (it) wavered and constantly flickered but held true to 12 and I walked in the direction it pointed. Two other people with compasses walked on my left but we all walked in the same direction.  Frank P.

Frank comments on his dream by saying: Part of the tragedy is that it is only back in our real self that we have any connection with the world, with nature, with our innate sense of self and direction. That part of us is like an inbuilt compass, orienting us to the world and to other people. That orientation connects us to the sun, the moon, the tides of life around us. If we are walking around as a pseudo person we haven’t got a bloody clue what that compass is telling us. Our evaluations of who we are and where we stand in life are all shot to pieces.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Where am I heading in life, and what does my dream add to what I know about my direction?

Is there anything I can understand from the direction the compass is suggesting?

What am I doing with the compass, and what does this suggest about the way I am relating to my intuition or instincts?

See Avoid Being Victims – Settings in Dreams – What is the main action in the dream?