Dream: The Meaning of Shoes

Dream 20030829, 5:00 AM:

I’m walking up to my house – except that it’s a different house than any of my real-life houses; it reminds me of some of the small turn-of-the-century houses over near Swiss, with a small neat yard and a wooden porch. There is a curving path cut through the green grass of the yard, and also through the concrete sidewalk. The path shows the dirt below, as if a perfect section of turf and walk about four inches across had been carefully sliced out.

I go inside, and there find Julie and Deborah. It turns out that somehow Julie cut the section in the lawn for Deborah; she’s going to lay a pattern of decorative bricks there. I ask Deborah what happened to her own house, and to her husband Danny; she explains that they have divorced, and she’s moving back in with me. I’m vexed and annoyed, because I wasn’t consulted about this at all, and it’s a very inconvenient surprise.

I go and get a pair of shoes – my white New Balance ones that I only use for the gym – and start to put them on. When I look down, though, I have two mis-matched shoes, neither of which is from the pair I thought I grabbed. I go back to where the shoes are sitting, beneath a chair, and grab them again – and again, when I sit down and start to put them on, they’re the wrong shoes. This time, one of them is a grungy old once-white shoe, and the other is black. I laugh, frustrated but amused, and remark that this must have some meaning. I ask, “What’s the meaning of shoes? Or the meaning to me, anyway?” I go back and get another pair of shoes (I don’t know where they appear from and disappear to; the room isn’t littered with shoes, and I don’t put back the wrong pairs) and although they’re wrong again, I just put them on and lace them up and go outside.

Once outside, it’s pouring rain. The house is on a fairly steep hill, and water is running down the street like a river. I have a big inflatable raft, and I kind of run-and-jump into it, like a toboggan. I have to lace something up on it, to get it stabilized; I remark that it’s the same type of laces as some of the shoes had, which were knotted and hard to work. I get them through the strapping on the boat finally, and float down the street like the rapids of a river.

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