The Dream Meaning of Shoes

Shoes represent our adaptations to a specific time and specific place in our lives.

Just as you would change footwear from time to time depending on where you’re going and what you’re doing, the same applies to your attitude and mindset.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think that their present mindset is hardcoded into their identity.

They forget that they were a completely different person a few years back.

If your subconscious is showing you images of shoes, this is not an empty detail.

This is not a type of dream you could easily experience and forget.

It packs a tremendous amount of meaning.

The problem with interpreting the typical shoe dream meaning is that it is very easy to forget these types of dreams.

After all, the main focus of your nighttime vision involves footwear.

Shoes are commonplace, and they are very easy to overlook.

You might even think that you’re not having much of a dream because it seems that your mental camera is stuck on the shoes that you’re wearing.

But you need to pay attention because your subconscious is actually trying to communicate deep personal truths that you cannot afford to overlook.

The General Meaning of Shoes in Dreams

If you’re trying to figure out the meaning of shoes in your dreams, please understand that shoes represent adaptation.

Your personality in this present time at this present place is a product of adaptation.

Your circumstances shape who you are.

You cope with certain patterns and situations in your life in your own personal way just like everybody else.

Shoes, by the same token, can easily be taken on and off.

You can wear different shoes in different settings, but your choice of shoes indicates how you cope with particular places and particular needs.

The same applies to your adaptations.

These take the form of attitudes, mindsets, and coping mechanisms.

When you are experiencing dreams involving shoes, your subconscious is trying to draw your attention to your feelings regarding your adaptations.

Maybe you’re not all that comfortable.

Maybe you feel that how you’re handling certain situations in different areas of your life could use some improvement.

In this context, it’s a good sign to see shoes in your dreams.

This is an indication that you can take off attitudes and mindsets just like footwear.

It’s not going to be easy because you’ve gone used to doing things and feeling about things a certain, but it can be done.

You give yourself that possibility, and this is why in this context, seeing shoes in your dreams is a very good sign.

Another general meaning of shoes indicates the need for protection.

Just as you need to protect your feet from whatever sharp objects are on the ground, you need to also protect your mindset.

In the age of social media, this has become harder than people care to realize.

You may be just minding your own business and scrolling down your social media feed on your mobile.

As you scan the content, some stories throw you off.

Others make you laugh, while others tick you off.

Whatever the case may be, you think you’re just going through a lot of content in a very short period of time because you’re the typical busy person.

Little did you know that you’re actually picking up a tremendous amount of emotional cues, mental programming, and attitude conditioning from your timeline.

In many cases, people feel that they’re just going through their routines and having a good time going through social media and they think that’s the end of it.

In reality, your mindset is partly the product of your media diet.

As the old saying goes, your mind is a garden: Thoughts are seeds.

You can choose to plant flowers or you can decide to plant weeds.

Unfortunately, social media is filled with weeds…of the very worst kind.

What makes them particularly bad is that they masquerade themselves as information.

Maybe it’s information about your friend going on a trip, getting a promotion, buying a new car, moving into a new house, or meeting somebody exciting and new.

Whatever the form “the news” takes, you have to understand its impact on you.

Because different social media content impacts different aspects of your psyche and emotional state.

If you’re not careful, you may actually be programming yourself to become the very worst version of yourself.

I’m not talking about the anti-thesis of the highest version of yourself.

That’s too easy.

In fact, it’s bordering on a caricature.

Instead, I’m talking about your social media diet reinforcing the all too human, natural tendency to do the very least to not evolve.

In other words, there’s always a part of us that wants to stay in place.

It doesn’t want to grow up.

It doesn’t want to mature.

It doesn’t want to do much of anything.

It just wants to stay in place.

Of course, this is impossible because change is the only constant in life.

There is this tension between our stubbornness and personal unwillingness to change and the reality of life which dictates change.

We remain children.

We age backward.

We hang on to stuff and mindsets that we shouldn’t be hanging on to.

When you have a dream involving shoes, your subconscious is telling you that you need to actively take control over what you expose your mind to.

You have to protect it just as your shoes protect your feet.

A lot of this requires a proactive form of thinking which a lot of people can’t be bothered with.

Please understand that attitudes are infectious.

So if you populate your feed with posts by negative people, don’t be all that surprised if you become negative and toxic as well.

After all, if you lie down with dogs, it’s not a shock when you get up with fleas.

Attitudes are infectious.

Also, you may be subjecting yourself to unintended consequences.

I can’t emphasize this part enough.

This is the third general meaning of dreams about shoes.

If you’re stumped about your shoe dream meaning, you might want to consider this third alternative.

Although your shoes do a good job of protecting your feet, from time to time, they make you stumble.

Maybe your shoes are designed a certain way and you end up knocking things.

You might end up kicking something that you wouldn’t if you were barefoot or you are wearing sandals.

In this context, you may be exposing yourself to situations that can trigger chain reactions that can bring out the worst in you.

One good example of this is your social media diet.

You may be thinking to yourself:

“I’m just checking out updates on crypto and celebrity news or finance.”

On the surface, that seems all well and good maybe even innocent.

But depending on the mental state that you’re in when you’re consuming this information and the emotional cues of the influencers giving you this stuff, you might be heading towards a certain emotional direction and you’re the last person to know.

Do you see how this works?

Understand that you stand in reaction to whatever is being said or shared around you.

So if you want to take a new path in life, you need to surround yourself with different people.

One of the most mind-blowing pieces of advice that somebody gave me in the past involves success.

My friend Max told me that if I want to be successful, I have to hang out with successful people.

He said people are like mirrors.

We bounce light against each other, but that light doesn’t maintain its intensity.

It actually increases the more you bounce it from person to person.

If you’re hanging around people who don’t want to improve their lives, who thinks small, and who are perfectly happy to settle for whatever crumbs life throws their way, don’t be surprised if you develop the same attitude.

What makes this tricky is that a lot of people hang out with people they think are “below them” but in reality, they’re all at the same level.

They just arrogantly convince themselves that these people are beneath me.

I’m just slumming.

I know I’m better than these people.

No, you’re not!

Hang out with people who you want to become.

Reflect their light and their light will transform you.

If you hang out with people you’re comfortable with because they appeal to your insecurities and you reflect their light, you become worse than them.

Do you see how this works?

When you see shoes in your dreams, your subconscious is telling you that just as your shoes can lead you to a different path and you wear different shoes for different journeys, you have to do the same with your mindset.

Your way of looking at the world may not fit the grand dreams and big ambitions you have chosen for yourself.

You might even be thinking that the best way to improve your life is to pattern your thinking patterns and match your behaviors with your role models.

You’re definitely on the right track with that strategy.

Mirroring does work.

But here’s the problem.

If you only think about them as some distant ideal and you don’t actually surround yourself with people with bits and pieces of their character, you’re not going anywhere.

All you’re doing is getting this “emotional high” from convincing yourself that you have a plan.

In reality, you don’t because you don’t want to get up and move up.

Most People Are Scared of Success

It doesn’t really matter how you define success.

Personally, I define success as having a happy family complete with useful people.

By useful I’m talking about people who help society in whatever way they can.

To me, that is the meaning of success.

But your definition may differ.

Regardless of how you define success, there’s a good chance, if you’re like most people, that you’re actually scared of it.

You might be thinking that this is crazy.

Why would somebody be scared of improving their lives or living the lives that embody their best potential?

Well, it’s actually simple.

Success takes work.

That’s right!

I’m not just talking about physical work.

I’m talking primarily about psychological and emotional work.

Success means that you’re going to put in the work even if you don’t see feedback.

You have to put in the time, focus, and energy sacrificing more pleasurable things even if you don’t get positive feedback.

And this might drag on day after day, week after week, month after month.

In fact on certain journeys to success, you can’t even see the end.

While you can visualize the end goal, there may be no actual milestones that you can point to in the here and now.

It’s as if you’re navigating this foggy ocean based solely on a map.

Do you see how this works?

This takes strength and most importantly this takes faith, and this is precisely why a lot of people are scared of success.

They’d rather come up with compartmentalized “good enough” definitions of it and leave it at that.

Don’t short-change yourself.

Understand that you have what it takes if you want it bad enough.

Working towards success is not to be feared.

You just have to have a workable plan.

One-Time-Big-Time Doesn’t Work

Since shoes indicate the mindsets that we need to navigate personal life changes, it’s important to understand that we need to be patient in pursuing positive change in our lives.

This is definitely true when it comes to pursuing any kind of success.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to rob ourselves of success when we hang on to the belief that it can only manifest if we put in the work in one big event.

This is called a one-time-big-time approach.

You give up everything and for a tiny window of time — it could be a day, it could be a month, it could be a year, depending on the context — you do your best and you either achieve great success or you don’t.

One-time-big-time.

It doesn’t work that way!

In many cases, success only materializes once the journey has changed you.

At first, you’re very impatient because it seemed to drag on forever, day after day, week after week, month after month.

It seems that throughout that journey, nothing seems to change.

But pretty soon, you start seeing changes.

The truth is they’ve been there.

The problem is your old way of thinking was getting in the way so you can’t even see them.

But now that the journey has slowly but surely changed you, now you’re beginning to see.

What Does the Meaning of Someone Wearing Your Shoes in Your Dreams?

Somebody is trying to copy you.

I’m not talking about plagiarism or some sort of copyright issue.

Instead, they find you inspiring so they want to copy you.

Usually, these are your children or somebody close to you.

In some cases, it could be a co-worker or even a subordinate.

While this might be pleasing to the ego, this puts the onus on you to be the right role model.

Now is not the time to be a hypocrite.

That’s right!

Now is not the time to say one thing and do another.

The hypocrite says: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

That’s not gonna wash.

You have to walk your talk.

Why?

People are not only looking but they want to copy you.

So make it count!

What Does It Mean to Dream Of Wearing Someone Else’s Shoes?

You’re very impatient with a certain area of your life.

In fact, the thought has crossed your mind:

“What if I lived somebody else’s life, at least when it comes to this issue?”

Maybe you’re the type of person who never really travels much?

When you see your friends’ Facebook posts of them going to Bali, Paris, the Amalfi Coast in Italy, or Boracay, part of you wants to be there too.

Now, it’s not really because you always wanted to go to those places.

Instead, you want to experience the freedom and the meaning behind the ability to travel that they have.

If you’re feeling this, it’s basically your personal impatience getting the better of you because you too are on a journey.

It’s a journey of self-discovery, and if you allow yourself to be patient enough, a journey of self-mastery.

But unfortunately, a lot of us cannot be bothered.

We’d rather have our cake immediately instead of putting in the work so we escape via other people’s lives.

It’s not really them that you’re envious of.

It’s what that travel represents.

What Does It Mean to Dream of Baby Shoes?

Let me tell you.

In your life’s journey, you may be taking baby steps and it might be burning you out.

You’re sick and tired of it.

You keep saying to yourself:

“I’m tired of this slow start.

It seems that no matter how hard I try, all I get are these incremental baby steps.”

But let me tell you: Any step forward, no matter how small, is still exactly that, a step forward.

And if you take enough baby steps, eventually you will enter a state of momentum where it’s easier to keep going than it is to stop.

Imagine that!

All that initial inertia that you had because of your mindset or your fear of change.

All of that has slowly given way, and now you have achieved a state of momentum.

But you can’t get there if you hesitate with each step.

Just let the baby steps come.

This is how you build better relationships.

This is how you lose weight.

This is how you get a better job.

This is how you build successful businesses.

Name any successful venture.

They all involve baby steps.

After all, you have to learn how to crawl before you can walk, and you have to learn how to walk before you can run.

What Does It Mean to Dream of Purple Shoes?

When you see purple shoes in your dream, it’s not because you’re some sort of big Barney the dinosaur fan or you’re a big aficionado of the 80s pop music icon Prince.

Instead, you desire something that makes you different from other people.

You want to stand out.

This dream imagery comes from a profound insecurity about being another face in the crowd.

You want to be the star of the show.

For once, you want the spotlight squarely on your image, and everybody can’t help but look.

We all have this desire, believe me, because at the end of the day, statistically speaking, we are all faces in the crowd.

There can only be a few people with the same stature as Obama.

Everybody else has to play second fiddle.

Name a historical giant and you will see a big name and a vast sea of forgotten names.

That is the case today, that has always been the case in the past, and I highly suspect that will continue to be the case long into the future.

This is a central facet of the human condition.

But there’s a part of you that just wants the spotlight.

I get that, I understand that.

But what are you doing about it?

Are you working to be the best at what you do?

Are you looking to expand your horizons or is this just a muted desire emanating from a deep and profound fear of insignificance?

This fear, in and of itself, is also rooted in low self-esteem.

Please understand that just because you’re facing the crowd doesn’t mean you are unimportant.

For people to be adored, it goes without saying that they need an adoring crowd.

It’s a symbiotic relationship.

They need you as much as you need them.

Focus more on attaining a sense of meaning in your day-to-day existence.

That is what counts because it doesn’t matter how many people repeat your name.

If you don’t have a sense of meaning to live from, then what do you actually have?

Plan Your Trip Carefully

Life can be described in many different ways.

The analogies are almost limitless.

One common way to describe life is that it is a journey.

You start from the beginning, you go through the middle, and just like every journey, it has an end.

A lot of people just look at that analogy and leave it at that.

It’s fairly straightforward.

But it is only as shallow or deep as you read your life into it.

The journey changes you.

That’s one thing that people don’t get.

They think that the baby that started that journey is the same as the old man or woman at the end.

No!

Absolutely wrong!

If you think about it, every step may involve some small incremental change, not just in the physical state of the person making that trip, but also in their attitude, mindset, and the way they look at the universe.

There’s actually a give-and-take between the journey and the person.

Different people who take different journeys go through different changes because each journey is different.

While it is true that there are universal archetypes involving certain common endeavors that we all share, for the most part, our journey is specific to us.

Allow the journey to change you.

Do you look at it as a grand adventure with lots of thrills, chills, and spills with every twist and turn and up and down terrain?

Or do you see it as some sort of punishment?

Do you see it as a reflection of the divine wrath of God because maybe you are a bad person?

Do you see it as some sort of cosmic payback?

There are many different ways to see the journey, but what’s important is that you’re clear as to how you’re defining it and that definition makes sense to you personally.

Because if it doesn’t make sense, then just like shoes, it’s time to take them off and put on new ones.

You are allowed to do that.

You have to give yourself permission to do that.

What Does It Mean to Dream Of Wearing Tight, Uncomfortable Shoes?

If your foot ache is the main focus of your dream complete with the central image of the shoes you’re wearing, this can indicate that your subconscious is trying to draw your attention to the fact that you cannot see the big picture.

You can only zoom in on the day-to-day, ins-and-outs, and ups-and-downs of your life.

You can’t tell the forest from the trees.

Well, there are two ways to change.

You can plan out your destination and everything goes to plan smoothly and easily.

Or, you can find yourself in a situation where circumstances are changing and you’re not in control and you respond based on where you would like to go.

A lot of people think that the first scenario is what happens to most people.

They’re mistaken!

I can understand why people believe that because it seems easy to understand.

It’s all well planned.

It can easily be rationalized and boiled down into numbers or even equations.

But in reality, it’s the latter that takes place.

Every single day, we’re faced with different variables and we have to be nimble, quick, and flexible enough to make the changes.

And these small changes affect us.

They’re not empty details.

They’re not done and are easily forgotten.

They accumulate.

Understand what exactly is going on.

Understand that your reaction on a day-to-day basis adds up to something.

It eventually adds up to the big picture of your life.

But the problem is that you’re so focused on just making this one change to make the threat of pain of loss go away.

And then once that’s done, you forget about it until something else comes up.

You can’t do that and call it a life.

You’re just simply reacting much like a frog.

Stand Up for What You Believe In

The same happens frequently throughout the United States on any given day.

An issue comes up, and an opinionated person speaks their mind, and everybody just nods along.

From time to time, you see clashes of strong personalities with matching equally strong opinions.

But for the most part, people just wait for somebody who is clearly passionate about their position to speak up and they just nod along.

Now, this nodding is everybody is aware doesn’t mean that they fully agree or that they even agree at all.

Instead, they’re basically just saying:

“Okay, I understand what you’re saying.

I may not agree with it, but I understand where you’re coming from, and let’s leave it at that.”

That is the operative phrase: “Let’s leave it at that.”

While this might make sense in many contexts, when it comes to who you are, where you want to go, who you want to become, what you can and cannot do, and where you can and cannot go, you have to stand up for what you believe.

Stand Up to Yourself

What makes the project above very difficult is for the most part the person we need to stand up to is our very own selves.

Ironic, right?

Because when you watch a typical Hollywood movie, there’s always this confrontation between the person who is trying to express themselves or express some great truth and the person in authority or the antagonist trying to suppress them.

It is this conflict that pushes and jolts the story forward.

But that’s not real life!

There is no antagonist for the most part.

There’s no “bad guy.”

Your struggle is with yourself.

Your struggle is with the part of you that doesn’t want change, that doesn’t want the bigger picture, that doesn’t want much of anything except for what they have right here right now.

Now you may be thinking to yourself: “Well, life sucks right now!”

But don’t underestimate people’s tendency to hang on to the Devil they know.

You may be thinking to yourself:

“Who in their right mind would want to end their present difficulties?”

Well, look in the mirror!

If you’re completely honest with yourself, there’s a big part of you that just wants things to remain the way they are because change is too painful.

You might have to sacrifice a lot of your sacred cows.

You might have to actually change your mindset.

Imagine that!

You might even have to change friends.

Do you see how this works?

In America, we are a society that talks a good game about self-actualization.

But in reality, all of us want to be sheep.

We like to pretend that we are marching to the beat of our own drummers, but in reality, we want to be the chorus.

We want the safety of the anonymity behind being another face in the crowd.

Conformity seduces the soul.

So which is it with you?

Are you content to think about grand dreams and plans with you in the center driving the action?

Or, are you willing to actually do something about it?

And the first step to doing that is to stand up for what you truly believe in.

Of course, this assumes that you actually believe in something so that’s another layer that you need to take care of.