Dreaming of an iris : what can this symbol evoke?

The messenger who goes lower

The distribution is clear in the texts : Hermes moves between heaven and men, Iris goes down to the depths — the sea and the abode of the dead. She is the envoy who reaches what no other messenger reaches.

Dreams often use this figure for what reaches you from a level consciousness does not frequent. An intuition about something old, an understanding coming from a forgotten period, information coming from none of your present relations.

The question it poses is precise : what you understood recently — where did it come from? Those who dream of irises have often received something without knowing by what route.

The rainbow is not her road

One version of the myth makes the rainbow the bridge she takes ; another makes it the trace she leaves after passing. The second is more interesting : what one sees is not the road, it is the wake.

Dreams often use this structure. What is visible of an important thing arrives after it and is not it : an emotion following an understanding, a colour left in a day by an event one did not identify. One looks at the remainder of the passage and not the passage.

What to remember is what the iris preceded or followed in your dream. The flower has a peculiarity pointing the same way : it fades quickly, and its sap lastingly stains the furniture it falls on. What remains is not the flower.

What the flower shows changes the reading

• An iris received or given — a message, in the language of flowers that kept it that sense.
• A rainbow after her passage — the visible trace of something one did not see pass.
• A flower fading very fast — this flower's own brevity, lasting only a few days.
• A stain left on furniture — what remains of a passage, and does not come out.
• Marsh irises — the flower's real place, far from its royal reputation.
• A flower taken for a lily — the historical confusion : the heraldic fleur-de-lys comes from a stylised iris.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in messenger figures because they describe how a content passes from one level to another : nothing rises by itself, a linking function is needed. Iris holds a particular place there through her descent to the depths, where other messengers do not go. Other readings retain the rainbow as trace rather than bridge, and the brevity of a flower that nonetheless leaves a lasting mark.