Losing Your Shoes in a Dream: What the Bible Says About Shoes

The Bible gives no meaning to losing your shoes in a dream. No dream in Scripture has shoes in it, and no verse explains a lost shoe, left or right, or one found again. Shoes themselves turn up all through the Bible, and the best of them are put on the feet of a son who came home with nothing.

That son is the prodigal. He had spent everything in a far country, and he came home with a speech ready: “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son” (Luke 15:18–19). His father ran to meet him and would not let the speech decide anything. “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet,” he told the servants, “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:22, 24). In that story the shoes come from the father. Whatever we lose in the night, we wake up as his children still.

Is losing shoes in a dream mentioned in the Bible?

No. Scripture tells of many dreams, from Jacob’s ladder to the warning that troubled Pilate’s wife, and shoes appear in none of them. Nor does the Bible teach that every picture in our sleep is a message. St John Climacus, abbot of the monastery at Sinai, whom the Orthodox Church remembers on the fourth Sunday of Lent, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent as a guide for monks and gave a plain definition: “A dream is a movement of the mind while the body is at rest.” The mind goes on moving at night, and Scripture never asks us to account for every place it wanders.

What do shoes mean in the Bible?

Shoes mean what each passage says they mean, and the passages say different things. Israel ate the first Passover “with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand” (Exodus 12:11), ready to leave Egypt that night. At the burning bush Moses heard the opposite command: “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5), and by Jericho the captain of the Lord’s host told Joshua the same (Joshua 5:15). In the days of Ruth, a man “plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour” to seal the redeeming of land (Ruth 4:7). And after forty years in the wilderness God reminded his people, “thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot” (Deuteronomy 29:5). He had kept their shoes the whole way. The Gibeonites, pretending to be ambassadors from far off, came to Joshua with “old shoes and clouted upon their feet” and said, “our shoes are become old by reason of the very long journey” (Joshua 9:5, 13). Worn-out shoes were the story they made up; the shoes God kept never wore out.

The shoes of the Bible were sandals, tied on with a strap or latchet. John the Baptist measured himself against Jesus by one: “whose shoes I am not worthy to bear” (Matthew 3:11), or in John’s Gospel, “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose” (John 1:27). Paul gathers the readiness into the armour of God: “your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15). Each of these meanings belongs to its own story, and what shoes symbolise in the Bible walks through them one by one.

Who in the Bible went without shoes?

A few people did, each for a reason the text gives. When his son Absalom rose against him, David fled Jerusalem: he “went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot” (2 Samuel 15:30). God told Isaiah to “put off thy shoe from thy foot,” and the prophet walked “naked and barefoot three years for a sign” that Assyria would lead the Egyptians and Ethiopians away as captives (Isaiah 20:2–4). Under the law of Moses, a man who would not raise up a name for his dead brother had his shoe pulled off before the elders, and his family was called “The house of him that hath his shoe loosed” (Deuteronomy 25:10). And Jesus sent the seventy out with nothing to spare: “Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes” (Luke 10:4).

Grief, captivity, shame, a mission travelled light: Scripture uses bare feet for each of these, and every time it tells us which. A dream comes with no such word. So if a dream left you barefoot, or with one shoe missing, these stories are about bare feet, and none of them is a key to the dream. The dream dictionaries that promise a meaning for a lost shoe are supplying what Scripture never gave them.

What if I search for my shoes in a dream, or find them again?

Scripture gives no meaning to searching for shoes and not finding them, or to finding them at last, and we would be wise not to give one ourselves. What the Bible does say about lost things is worth more than any reading of a dream. Jesus told three stories in a row about them. A shepherd finds his sheep and calls his neighbours: “Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.” A woman lights a candle, sweeps the house and seeks “diligently till she find it,” and then says, “Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost” (Luke 15:6, 8–9). Then comes the son, and the father who ran to meet him. Each story ends in joy, and the joy is God’s: “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10).

Should Christians trust their dreams?

With care. God can speak in a dream, and Daniel told the king of Babylon that “there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:28). Yet through Jeremiah God warned his people in exile, “neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed” (Jeremiah 29:8). Climacus put the danger in a picture: “he who believes in dreams is like a person running after his own shadow and trying to catch it.”

So we weigh a dream against God’s word, and we need not chase a lost shoe through the night.

What can we do with a dream that stays with us?

Pray it through, and then get up. When the angel came to Peter in prison, he woke him with “Arise up quickly,” and “his chains fell off from his hands” (Acts 12:7). Then he was told something ordinary: “Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals,” and “Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me” (Acts 12:8). Peter followed, and “wist not that it was true which was done by the angel; but thought he saw a vision” (Acts 12:9). The nearest Scripture comes to shoes in a dream turned out to be no dream at all. The sandals were real, and so was the One who sent for him. We can wake from an unsettled night the same way, putting our shoes on and following.

Feet in Scripture are made for going somewhere, and Scripture calls them beautiful when they carry good news: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!” (Isaiah 52:7).

Related reading

• What Do Feet Symbolize in the Bible?
• Dreaming About Walking: Scripture’s Main Word for a Life
• Dreaming of Walking in Mud
• The Meaning of the Prodigal Son Parable
• 22 Bible Verses About Dreams
• Dreaming About Snakes: What the Bible Says