Dreams of flip-flops and cleats

 

I was going to cover this dream from last night in the last post I just wrote, but felt it was too much of a tangent in terms of scope to drag that one on longer just to cover.  So, I will do it here instead.  The tie back to that post, however, just to keep in mind, is this concept of 'footwear' and slippers or slip-shoes, which extends all the way back to at least the Xanadu posts about needing new shoes to roller-skate on, and even a day before that over on William Tychonievich's blog where he had a reference to a running shoe called the Gel-Nimbus.

So, the dream:

I was with my two youngest kids at something like a shopping mall.  I had to leave them in a store for some reason that I forgot, and I told them that I would be back to get them and they needed to stay there in the store until I returned.  No wandering off.  I went off to run an errand or something (I can't remember exactly where I went off to or why), and I eventually returned to the store.

Upon returning, I found my daughter walking around the store and she came up to me and said my youngest had not been really behaving as well as she thought he should have been.  This wasn't surprising given my youngest son's energy and tendency to get into mischief (as well as my daughter's tendency to try and get him into trouble).  I went to go find him, and found both him and a person I took to be the store owner.  As the store owner saw me approaching, he turned to my son and simply said "You need to go now, [son's name]".  He then turned and walked away into a back room.  My first instinct was to think that my son really must have been misbehaving to get that kind of treatment (but I reconsidered this upon waking up, and felt that the store owner was just telling my son that since I was back, it was time for him to leave).

We left the store, and were a little way down the street when I realized I had forgotten my shoes.  This is now the 2nd dream in the last few days involving shoes for me (maybe I will recount the other one here also, now that I think about it).  As I was deciding what to do, two assistants from the store we had been at came running up behind us with my flip-flops (the kind of footwear I had been wearing).  I thanked them for tracking us down and returning them, and then said something like "I wouldn't have gotten very far without these!".

The specific flip-flops I wear are OluKai brand, and it was these same sandals in the dream - this was prominently shown to be what they were carrying.  The symbol for OluKai is the Makau, or fishhook:

Straight from OluKai's website, they say the Makau symbolizes "safe passage over water":

Regarded as a symbol for safe passage over water, the makau, or fishhook, brings good fortune and strength to those who wear it.

One of the assistants also had a single shoe in their hand, and I looked down and saw that my daughter was only wearing one shoe.  The shoe the assistants were carrying belonged to her.  My daughter is always forgetting things in real life, and I asked her how she could have both left her shoe and also failed to recognize this fact as we were walking ("How could you not realize you were walking with one shoe on!?").  She simply replied that she hadn't thought she would need it.  I then told her to take the shoe from the assistants anyway, because a person really should have two shoes on, and even if she didn't want to wear it or think she needed it, we should bring it with us just in case.

I then woke up.

Alright, so there is some pretty obvious symbolism here that ties into other things noted on this blog, but also on William's.   I am not even going to go into them right now, though, so am just logging the dream.

Here is the dream I had a few days ago also related to footwear.

I was playing football for my college team again, though not like back in time - just now and obviously older, or later in time.  This was made obvious by my old defensive coordinator going out of his way to say to me "It is good to have you back!".  The arrangement seemed strange, but I guess I got used to in in the dream-reality.  And I actually had fun playing again, with the added benefit that I felt really young again, even if I knew I was older.

I ended up playing in multiple games, it seemed, or maybe it was during halftime, but I found myself in the locker room unable to find the cleats I had been wearing.  I assumed someone took them by mistake, so I asked around and checked with the equipment manager.

I was directed toward a pair of cleats that, if I remember correctly, were suggested might be mine.  They were white, like my missing cleats, and were my size, but that is where the similarities ended.  I had been wearing Nike cleats, and these were definitely not Nikes.  As I inspected the cleats closer, I saw that they were a brand I had never heard of before.  Running along the back heel of each cleat was the brand name (or what I assumed was the brand name) "ACE" in all caps like that.

I turned the cleats over to look at the condition of the actual cleats or studs themselves.  What I found was surprising.  While the shoes definitely had studs on the bottom, they were covered by a sheet of special material that was stretched over them, running along the whole sole of the shoe, so that for all intents and purposes the surface was flat (i.e., the sheet didn't follow the contours of the studs, but just was laid flatly over them).  The material that covered the cleats looked like they were meant to run on something, for sure, but it didn't seem like it would be grass, given that the studs would not be able to provide any traction or dig into the ground with the sheet in the way.   They looked like they were almost meant to slide or glide over something.   Thinking that this must all be some kind of mistake, I set the cleats down, and then woke up.