Sheep

The sheep is innocence within belonging. Christian tradition gives us the lamb as symbol of sacrificial gentleness and of the community gathered under a shepherd. Pastoral traditions across the Mediterranean and Central Asia treat sheep with the tenderness owed to a creature that provides wool, milk, and — sometimes — its life. Jungian analysis reads sheep-dreams as meditations on the self’s need for belonging, and on the risk of dissolving into a collective identity. A single sheep parted from the flock often marks a dreamer recognizing their difference; a dream of shearing, a shedding of a protective identity no longer needed.