Sheep in a dream

Allah sent no prophet who had not shepherded sheep, the Prophet ﷺ said, and when his Companions asked whether he had done it too, he said yes, he had shepherded for the people of Makkah, for some qirats (Bukhari 2262).

That makes the sheep an odd animal to find in a dream dictionary. It isn't the animal of power or fear. It is the animal of responsibility, and almost everything the sources say about sheep is about who is looking after them. We will go through that evidence first, because the dictionaries' readings sit on top of it.

A staff, a field, a ewe and a ransom

Four scenes in the Qur'an turn on sheep or on a sacrificial animal, and each gives the flock a different job. In the first, Allah asks Musa what is in his hand, and he lists what the staff is for: he leans on it, and he beats down leaves for his sheep (Qur'an 20:18). His sheep come into the answer as part of an ordinary working day.

In the second, Dawud and Sulayman judge a case about a field that a people's sheep overran at night, and Allah says He gave Sulayman understanding of it (Qur'an 21:78-79). In the third, 2 men climb over the wall of Dawud's prayer chamber with a quarrel over ewes: one has 99, the other has a single ewe, and the plaintiff says the first overpowered him in speech. Dawud says he has wronged him, and then realises that he himself has been put to the test, and asks forgiveness and falls prostrate (Qur'an 38:21-24). The ewe here is a poor man's one possession set beside a rich man's many.

The fourth involves a dream. Ibrahim sees in a dream that he must sacrifice his son, the son says to do as he is commanded, and when they have both submitted Allah calls to him that he has fulfilled the vision, and ransoms the boy with a great sacrifice (Qur'an 37:102-107). The verse never says which animal. It is the commentators who say a ram. See Ibrahim and the dream of the sacrifice for the whole account.

What the Prophet's similes do with a flock

The Sunnah stretches the shepherd far beyond sheep. The Prophet ﷺ said that every one of you is a shepherd, and every one will be asked about his flock: the ruler about his people, a man about his household, a woman about her husband's home, a servant about his master's goods (Muslim 1829a). That hadith is the obvious source for reading a flock as the people in someone's charge.

His sheep similes are blunt. A hypocrite is like a sheep that roams aimlessly between 2 flocks, going to one and then to the other (Muslim 2784a). And a time will come, he said, when a Muslim's best property will be sheep that he takes to the mountain tops and the places of rainfall, running with his religion from trials (Bukhari 7088). In one the sheep is the picture of someone with no settled loyalty. In the other it is a person's refuge and wealth together.

Both are about waking life. Neither tells you what a sheep means in sleep, and we do not offer them as if they did.

How the dictionaries read a flock

The dictionary tradition reads sheep from what they are: lawful, gentle, useful, giving milk and wool and offered in sacrifice. The readings that recur are blessing and easy provision, people in one's charge (family, students, followers), and, for a ram, a man of standing. The step from the Qur'an's ransom to a slaughtered animal standing in for a person is the one place where a verse is plainly in the background.

Who is dreaming shapes which row applies. Following Muslim 1829a, a parent, a teacher, a manager and a ruler each have a different flock, so the same picture of sheep points at different things. That variation is our reading of the hadith, not a rule from the books.

If a flock was threatened in the dream, the wolf is the other half of the picture, and the entry on it covers what that animal does in the sources.