Dreaming of a globe : what can this symbol evoke?

A half always hidden

One can go round a cube and know it entirely ; a sphere, never. Circling serves nothing — the face appearing replaces the one disappearing, and the total is never given. It is a perfection one cannot take in.

Dreams often use this figure for what one understands well and never completely. A person known for thirty years, a situation one masters and one side of which always escapes, a subject studied with a part invisible from where one stands.

The question it poses is useful : what do you believe you have gone all round? Those who dream of spheres often stand before something they thought they knew.

The world held in a hand

European sovereigns had themselves depicted holding a globe topped by a cross : the world in the hand, reduced to a portable object. The image states power, and it states the reduction that power presupposes.

Dreams often use this dimension for a view so general it has ceased to be concrete. Understanding a whole situation while touching none of it, deciding at the scale of a country without knowing anyone, holding in one hand what contains millions of lives.

What to remember is the object's size. A globe one holds speaks of power and its abstraction ; an immense globe before which one stands speaks of the opposite — and the second variant is more frequent than the first.

What the sphere shows changes the reading

• A visible face and a hidden face — what you know well and never entirely.
• Circling without ever seeing it all — effort that does not give what it promised.
• A globe held in the hand — a real power and the reduction it presupposes.
• An immense sphere before you — the opposite : what contains you and which you do not command.
• A globe turning by itself — a movement you witness without taking part.
• A perfectly smooth surface — a form without hold, on which nothing catches.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Analytical psychology places the sphere among figures of the Self, like the circle and the mandala, noting a peculiarity : totality there is real and inaccessible to sight, which fairly describes a consciousness's relation to what exceeds it. One always sees a part, never the whole. Other readings retain the sovereigns' globe and the reduction implied in holding a world in one hand.