Dreaming about sheep
Sheep are reported as a mass rather than as animals, and the reports are notable for how little happens in them. Where a single lamb appears the register changes completely, and where a goat appears it changes again.
Also searched as: sheep, lamb, flock, goat, goats
Flock reports are among the least eventful in the database. Movement across a field, the dreamer watching, and no narrative. Dreamers frequently report them as pleasant and unmemorable.
A single lamb produces protective reports very similar to the rabbit ones, and dreamers describe tenderness.
Goats are reported quite differently: individual, attentive, and frequently described as looking at the dreamer. The horizontal pupil is mentioned unprompted with surprising regularity.
Counting sheep is invoked by dreamers as a joke often enough to note, and the folk association is strong enough that some report it as the content of the dream.
Common associations
- Mass without individuality, in the flock reports.
- Following, which is the inherited English idiom rather than an observation.
- Sacrifice and pastoral care, a substantial religious inheritance.
- The goat as the opposite of the sheep, which several traditions insist on firmly.
Positive readings
Flock dreams are restful and are one of the few images that reliably produces a calm dream with no content, which has its own value.
Lamb reports are tender and are described warmly.
Difficult readings
Almost nothing. A dead or lost sheep produces mild distress and usually belongs to a wider dream about loss.
Where the goat is present the reports carry a specific unease that dreamers usually attribute to the eyes.
Psychological perspectives
The near absence of content in flock reports is the interesting feature. Most dream settings generate a narrative, and this one reliably does not.
That may be about individuation: a dream that cannot pick out one animal has nothing to build a story around, and so produces a scene instead of an event.
The goat reports are a good illustration of how a single perceptual detail, in this case the pupil, can carry an entire emotional response.
Cultural and historical
The pastoral imagery of Judaism and Christianity is enormous and largely benign, with the flock and the shepherd as a central relationship, and it is available to a very large number of dreamers.
The goat has been assigned the opposite role in the same tradition, which is a deliberate historical construction rather than anything about goats, and it has been reinforced heavily by later folklore.
Sheep as followers is an English idiom of no great age, and it is worth separating from the older material because dreamers routinely conflate the two.
What the sleep science says
Reasonably supported: dream narratives require an individuated subject to build around, which fits the reported difference between flocks and single animals.
Not established: any meaning for sheep or goats. The two are opposed by tradition rather than by observation.
Your own context
- Was it a flock or an individual?
- Sheep or goat?
- Did anything happen at all?
- What did the eyes look like?
If this recurs
Recurring flock dreams are worth keeping a note of precisely because so little happens: the record over time is more informative than any single entry.
Emotions often reported
- calm
- peace
- tenderness
- detachment
- unease
- affection
Specific sheep dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
Where it happened
What state it was in
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Did anything happen?
- Was there one I could pick out?
- Was it a goat, and did that change things?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.The dream narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (Genesis 20, 28, 37 and 40 to 41; Daniel 2, 4 and 7; Matthew 1 to 2 and 27; Acts 10 and 16)Religious or philosophical text
Various, compiled
Cited for: What the biblical texts themselves record about dreams: that they are treated as a channel of divine communication, that interpretation is presented as a gift rather than a technique, and which specific dreams and readings appear. Cited for what the text says, never as evidence about dreaming.
- 2.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 3.Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)Historical dream record
Artemidorus of Daldis (200)
Cited for: The earliest surviving systematic dream dictionary, and evidence that dream interpretation has been organised by symbol and by the dreamer's circumstances for at least eighteen centuries.
- 4.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of sheep have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- AnimalCowCattle produce two entirely separate report types depending on one variable: whether it is a herd or a bull. The herd is calm and largely without narrative; the bull is one of the more reliably frightening animals in the database.
- PlaceGardenGardens are described more positively than almost any other setting, and the two states that dominate the reports, tended and overgrown, are described very differently. The state of the garden carries the dream, not the garden.
- EmotionPeacePeaceful dreams are under-reported rather than uncommon. They are less memorable and less likely to be searched for. When they are reported, they are described with unusual warmth.
- AnimalAn animal that speaksReported calmly and accepted entirely, which is the finding. A talking animal is a large impossibility and produces almost no objection, where a wrong staircase frequently produces some.
- AnimalBatBat reports are dominated by unpredictable movement in an enclosed space, and specifically by the head. The fear of a bat getting into hair is reported often enough to be its own thing, and it is largely a cultural artefact.
- AnimalBearBears are reported as a threat that is not hunting you, which is unusual and is what separates them from the other large predators here. The characteristic report is of an animal that is enormous, close, and not yet decided.
Records that mention sheep
These pages link to sheep, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.