That does sound like the compass was like what I have been dreaming of. In my dreams, I work for a place called the Warehouse where we collect dangerous objects called artifacts. These artifacts have magical abilities, of a sort, that can do all manner of things.
The ones I have seen include a thimble that can change your physical appearance, a lantern that mesmerizes and paralyzes you if you gaze into it, a ram's horn trumpet that pulverizes and kills anything and anyone in the line of it's blast, among other things. There are artifacts I have heard of in my dreams that utilize teleportation, one being Rheticus' Compass, though I have not crossed paths with that in my dreams thus far.