The dream:

The dreamer is talking to a woman who is hiding her left foot under a blanket. The dreamer asks to see her foot and she shows it briefly. Her foot is infected, with open bleeding wounds of red and purple with the skin sluffing off. It looks gross and sore and as though it’s disintegrating. It sickens a little to look at it and she covers it back up. She doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it. There’s a thought that her foot needs to be cleansed or disinfected.

An Interpretation:

Though this dream could represent the soreness the dreamer had been feeling lately in both feet It’s more likely that it has deeper meaning. In general, feet in dreams have something to do with one’s stability, one’s foundation, the feeling of groundedness and practicality. The injury may be related to a feeling of a loss of groundedness or stability emotionally or with sense of self.

Perhaps the dreamer needs to heal old emotional wounds or traumas or at least look at them again i.e., to look at them no matter how gross in order to move on. The scarring on the foot could be symbolic of having been scarred. The need to disinfect may reflect the need to rid oneself of the judgments and negative self-talk that is affecting their self-image.

The image of something disintegrating seems to reinforce the idea that some thoughts are destroying the dreamer’s sense of well-being, sense of belonging, and/or sense of emotional balance. The foot being in ruins might be speaking to the need to end something, e.g., some way of being or to regain balance.

There’s also the fact that the person in the dream is female which might suggest that some feminine aspect has been injured, e.g., compassion for self?

The “left” foot in this dream may be referring what is not normal or usual in that something unusual needs to be tried to regain one’s balance.

Bleeding in dreams often refers to a loss of vitality and energy for life or for some task or for one’s self-image.

The sluffing skin may be suggesting the loss of cover that reveals the damage inside.

I read somewhere that in the monastic tradition people are encouraged to look deeper into themselves to see what it is that is getting in there way but that they are also trained to look for and empower the good. Accepting the good in all the morass of what one may have judged as no good may seem fake or disingenuous. Plus, if they start giving themself atta boys that leaves them open to critiques about the foundations of those atta boys which could leave them vulnerable and only prove that the negatives are right (oh what a tangled web our egos weave).

Could the dreamer’s negative self-talk have escalated to the point where they haven’t been able to modify let alone stop it? This dream seems to be an artifact of this. But it may have an answer in that it encourages them to confront the ugliness and to get help to heal instead of just covering it up and keeping it to themself.