Shoes That Have Not Learned Your Feet
In a pair fresh from the box, stiff leather pushes back at your heel and the uncreased upper resists each bend. A new shoes dream reflects the break-in time between a role or position you have already taken on and a body not yet settled into it. The change has already reached your feet, and the work of fitting them to its stiffness takes the form of new shoes.
On the first morning after replacing your bicycle, just before an intersection, your fingers search for the brake where it sat on the old bike and close on air. The width of the handlebars, the weight of each push on the pedals, and the timing of a gear shift have not yet sunk in. The few days when only the bicycle has changed and your movements adjust to the new frame, and the stiffness of new shoes in the dream, belong to one break-in period.
The Path a New Pair Travels
- Buying new shoes - You try on pair after pair at the store shelf and finally carry one to the register. All those fittings show a caution about checking the fit yourself before accepting a new position.
- Going out in new shoes - You leave home in the pair you just bought and set off on your usual route. Familiar streets with only your footwear new belong to days when life keeps its shape and just part of your post has changed.
- New shoes in the wrong size - The shoes pinch your toes, or are so loose your heels lift. Tight or loose, it is the unease of a first fitting, before leather and foot meet each other and the shape settles.
- Getting blisters from new shoes - As you walk, your heel rubs raw and a small pain comes with each step. The dream draws the friction of settling into a role down to where the half-healed sore sits.
- Keeping them in the box on display - You leave the new shoes in their box on a shelf, lid ajar, only to look at them. The wish to keep them clean and hesitation over the role that starts once they are worn share that half-open lid.
- Receiving new shoes - Opening the package, you find shoes in a color you would not have picked. Their color and style carry the shape of the role the giver hopes to see you take on.
- Having someone choose for you - A clerk or a relative points to a pair and decides while you hesitate. Relief at handing over the choice and unease at not having made it mix over that pair.
- White new shoes - You walk in brand-new white shoes, stepping around puddles. The way you stop before every puddle shows a care to keep a duty that has just begun unscratched.
- Black new shoes - For a ceremony or an interview, you take out new black leather shoes and pull the laces tight. Readiness to set yourself in order from the feet up before a formal day shows in the retied knot.
- New shoes getting dirty or wet - It rains on the day you first wear them, and mud splashes the toes. This is a scene of frustration at an early stumble in a new life, drawn down to where the mud landed.
- Placing old and new shoes side by side - You set the new pair beside the worn, familiar one. Hesitation between a former position you cannot quite drop and the one ahead takes the shape of the short gap between the pairs.
- Giving them away before wearing them out - You bag a pair with barely worn soles to pass on or return to the store. Permission to step down from a role before it settles on you rests in the hand that closes the bag.
Soles Fresh From the Box
Shoe dreams read how you walk from everything on your feet, worn-out pairs included, while a new shoes dream narrows to soles that have never touched the ground and the time it takes to fit them. The fear of having something taken from under you belongs to dreams about losing your shoes, and the shoes here have not even been worn long enough to lose.
New clothes also turn up in clothes dreams, but clothing is seen by others and judged first by its look. New shoes, however good they look, do not reveal their fit until you walk. Measuring a new position by how it feels on the move rather than how it looks is the reading that belongs to shoes.
A Title You Are Not Used to Hearing
A new shoes dream is tied to a time when your position has already changed, yet your daily motions still run in the old order. On the morning you first walk to a new school or job in shoes bought for the commute, the stiffness on top of your foot lasts all day, and the walk home is spent thinking of taking them off. In the week after a promotion lifts your title a step, your reply lags half a beat each time someone uses the new name. At your first year-end gathering with a spouse's family, or in the first months after a child is born and people call you a parent, you turn a beat late when called by your relation instead of your name.
Until the Shoe Counts as Foot
Body schema refers to the internal model the brain keeps of the body's current shape and posture, including where the limbs are. The model is updated each time the body moves and, usually without reaching awareness, organizes action in space. Experiments show that tools held in the hand also join this model soon after use.
Born from the study of how the sense of the body's position is kept, this term comes from a different source than dreams, and here it serves as a guiding line for the new shoes dream. A dream scene where every step draws your attention to the shoe's edge, and you cannot settle where your foot ends and the shoe begins, is the model of your foot not yet rewritten to include the shoe. The small pain of a blister and the awkward gait in unfamiliar shoes are drawn as the felt sign that the rewriting is under way.
Whose Hands Chose This Pair?
In a new shoes dream, who chose the shoes turns the direction of the reading. If you chose them yourself after trying pair after pair, the role is also one you chose, and the stiffness is a break-in you carry yourself. Shoes given to you, or picked for you, come packed with the chooser's expectations along with the style and color.
Keeping new shoes boxed on display and giving them away before they wear out are paired scenes that show, from opposite sides, your distance from a position half taken on. Shoes kept on display gain no dirt or scratches, but they never learn the shape of your feet. A new post, too, becomes your own only after you start using it and it picks up a few scuffs and loses its first shape.
The First Crease Across the Upper
The first crease in the leather of the upper catches your eye in a new shoes dream as the mark of a pair beginning to learn its owner's walk. Depending on whether the crease stirred regret or relief, the same pair looks like a role still kept like goods in a box, or one starting to become part of your foot. On the asphalt in the dream, the edge of a still-white sole bears the mark of its first pebble.