What Does Dreaming About Scales Mean?

Psychologically, scales are the instrument of weighing and balance — so they most often touch balance, justice, and weighing: measuring things against each other, weighing a decision, and the sense of fairness, balance, or equilibrium (or their lack). Scales weigh and compare, and so they often mirror where you're weighing something up, judging fairness, or feeling your life balanced or out of balance.

This carries several charges. As balance and equilibrium, scales touch the balance (or imbalance) in your life — balanced and even, or tipped and out of balance. As justice and fairness, scales are the emblem of justice, touching fairness, injustice, and a sense of things being fair or unfair, just or unjust. As weighing a decision, scales touch weighing a choice — measuring the pros and cons, weighing options against each other before deciding. As judgment and being weighed, scales touch being judged or assessed — 'weighed' and found wanting or worthy, measured against a standard. As measure, scales touch measuring and assessing the worth or weight of something. Whether the scales are balanced and even, tipped to one side, weighing a decision, or weighing and judging usually mirrors balance and equilibrium, justice and fairness, weighing a choice, judgment and being weighed, and the measuring and assessing of worth.

A Freudian reading would attend to the scales as the instrument of weighing and judgment — bound up with the weighing of choices and worth, the measuring of one thing against another, and (as the emblem of justice) the judgment of fairness and the assessment of the self. The scales can embody the weighing of competing forces and choices, and the judgment and measuring of worth and fairness.

Their balance or their tipping carries the charge of weighing and of judgment. What the scales evoke — the equilibrium of the balanced scale, the imbalance of the tipped one, the assessment of being weighed — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to weighing and judgment: the weighing of competing desires and choices, the judgment of fairness and worth, and the search for balance among the forces that pull within.

Scripture's scales (balances) are a recurring image of justice and of being weighed — the call for 'a just weight and a just balance,' the warning against 'a false balance' (which is 'abomination to the Lord'), and the solemn 'thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.' The scales are supremely the image of justice, just measure, and the weighing of the soul and its deeds.

A scales dream, read this way, can touch justice, fairness, weighing, or being weighed. A biblical sensibility might weigh the scales above all through justice and honest measure — 'a just weight,' the abomination of 'a false balance' — and through the weighing of the soul, 'weighed in the balances,' reading the dream as a prompt toward justice and honesty in one's dealings (a 'just balance'), and toward an honest weighing of one's own life and deeds, that one not be 'found wanting' before the One who weighs the heart.

In Islamic sensibility the scales (al-Mizan) carry a profound resonance — the Balance in which deeds are weighed on the Day of Judgment ('We shall set up scales of justice... so that not a soul will be dealt with unjustly'), and the call to justice and honest measure ('give full measure and weight in justice'). The scales evoke justice, honest measure, and the weighing of deeds in the Balance.

A scales dream, in this frame, might point to balance, justice, weighing a choice, or being weighed and judged. Held with humility, the scales can recall the Mizan — the Balance in which every deed is weighed with perfect justice — and the call to justice and honest measure in one's dealings ('give full measure'), reading the dream as an invitation to justice, fairness, and honesty, to a mindful weighing of one's own deeds, and to the hope that one's scale of good be made heavy on the Day the scales are set.

In a Hindu frame the scales touch balance and justice, and the deeper theme of karma and the weighing of one's deeds — the moral balance in which action and consequence are weighed, dharma (righteousness, right balance), and the equilibrium the tradition prizes. The scales evoke balance and justice, the weighing of deeds (karma), and dharma.

A scales dream, in this frame, can point to balance and equilibrium, justice and fairness, weighing a choice, or being weighed. The tradition's note attends to balance and the weighing of deeds: the scales as an image of justice and balance, and of the moral weighing in which one's deeds (karma) are measured — an invitation to justice and fairness in one's dealings, to an honest weighing of one's own actions, and to the cultivation of balance and equilibrium (dharma) in a life that seeks the even and the just.