Fitful sleep left Joseph, the vizier to the Pharaoh of Egypt, tossing and turning in his bed, unable to escape the vivid dreams which accompanied him that evening. As often happens with our dreams, each bled continuously into one another in a surreal and phantasmagoric manner which, on its face, would normally appear absurd to us in our daily lives. But through the looking glass of that mysterious slumber which overcomes us each night, the unfamiliar and strange become the banal and self-evident. In this realm, the axioms of common sense and the basic presuppositions of reality invert in a strange, sometimes eldritch way. But perhaps this phenomenon ought not be so foreign to us. For even in our waking lives, we sometimes find that the spheres of sense and meaning—those matrixes of ideas and poltergeists—which we inhabit are sometimes inverted when illuminated from a different perspective: the beautiful rendered sinister and the macabre suddenly divine. Perhaps it is as Zhuangzi said: we may very well be in our own butterfly reverie.
That night, Joseph dreamt that he stood at the precipice of a cliff overlooking an Egyptian town. The town was surrounded by thin, scorched stalks of grain which grew taller and taller before his very eyes. The townspeople could not reach the heads of the grain, and their scythes could not fell the stalks. The more they hacked at the stalks, the duller their scythes became; the duller their scythes, the angrier they became.
Joseph awoke from this bout of sleep in a cold sweat. “The stalks of grain,” he surmised, “must represent the price of food, which will increase many times over.” Some fear gripped him as he thought of the difficulty he would face advising Pharaoh on such matters.1 As he let his terror subside, he drifted back to sleep.
Joseph had another dream. This time, he dreamt that his grand-uncle Laban was the manager of Egypt’s national bank. “How could it be,” he wondered, “that the uncle of my father Jacob has left the land of Aram and joined the Egyptian ranks?” But as Joseph sank deeper into sleep, this apparent inconsistency faded from his mind. He saw that Laban had made loans to many of the serfs in the land, but was now concerned about their ability to repay.
“What has happened, my uncle?” Joseph asked Laban.
“My son,” Laban said plaintively, “I have concentrated the nation’s finances in the agricultural sector. The harvest has been unkind this year, and Pharaoh is increasingly absent. I worry for the future.”
Joseph awoke suddenly again. He did not know what this meant, for he was not himself a merchant or banker. But nevertheless it filled him with fear and dread. He pondered this vision for a long while before once again drifting back to sleep.
In his final dream, Joseph saw Pharaoh surveying the state of Egypt’s buildings and architecture. It was odd for Pharaoh to be so close to the commoners, for he normally remained in the palace and delegated this work to his council. That Pharaoh was in the field himself meant that something was awry indeed. He saw Pharaoh pick up a stone, a stone which his builders had rejected, and threw it with all his might.
Joseph’s gaze followed the trajectory of the brick. It landed far outside of the palace of Pharaoh. Once it hit the ground, it formed the cornerstone of a new building which emerged in its place.2 Curious, Joseph walked toward the building and peered inside of it. What he saw amazed and terrified him. On one side of the room he peered into, he saw a large automated machine which threshed the wheat of the field, producing abundance for the land. It cut down the large stalks of grain which had come to block out the sun, and the people were overjoyed, for they once again enjoyed the warmth of the sun and the harvest of the land. On the other side, he saw thousands of apparitions whispering into the ears of the townspeople, lulling them into various sorts of stupors and rages. He entered the room, and the door closed behind him.
He again awoke from this dream. Dawn had appeared.
Consider Leo Strauss’s commentary on Xenophon’s depiction of Simonides (an adviser) and Hiero (a tyrant):
The polite question which he addresses to a tyrant who is not his ruler keeps in the appropriate middle between the informal request, so frequently used by Socrates in particular, “Tell me,” or the polite request, “I want very much to learn,” on the one hand, and the deferential question addressed by Socrates to tyrants who were his rulers (the “legislators” Critias and Charicles), “Is it permitted to inquire…?” on the other. By his question, Simonides presents himself as a wise man who, always desirous to learn, wishes to avail himself of the opportunity of learning something from Hiero. He thus assigns Hiero the position of a man who is, in a certain respect, wiser, a greater authority than he is himself. Hiero, fully aware of how wise Simonides is, has not the slightest notion as to what sort of thing he could know better than a man of Simonides’ wisdom. Simonides explains to him that since he, Hiero, was born a private man and is now a tyrant, he is, on the basis of his experience of both conditions, likely to know better than Simonides in what way the life of a tyrant and that of private men differ with regard to human enjoyments and pains. The choice of the topic is perfect.
…
During his stay with Hiero, Simonides had observed several things about the ruler-some concerning his appetite, some concerning his amours; and Simonides knew that Hiero was making certain grave mistakes, such as his participating at the Olympic and Pythian games. To express this more generally, Simonides knew that Hiero was not a perfect ruler. He decided to teach him how to rule well as a tyrant. More specifically, he considered it advisable to warn him against certain grave mistakes. But, to say nothing of common politeness, no one wishes to rebuke, or to speak against, a tyrant in his presence. Simonides had, then, by the least offensive means to reduce the tyrant to a mood in which the latter would be pleased to listen attentively to, and even to ask for, the poet’s advice. He had at the same time, or by the same action, to convince Hiero of his competence to give sound advice to a tyrant.
…
The artifice by means of which Simonides brings about this result consists in his giving to Hiero an opportunity of vindicating his superiority while demonstrating his inferiority. He starts the conversation by presenting himself explicitly as a man who has to learn from Hiero, or who is, in a certain respect, less wise than Hiero, or by assuming the role of the pupil. Thereafter, he makes himself the spokesman of the opinion that tyrannical life is more desirable than private life, i.e., of the crude opinion about tyranny which is characteristic of the unwise, of the multitude, or the vulgar. He thus presents himself tacitly, and therefore all the more effectively, as a man who is absolutely less wise than Hiero. He thus tempts Hiero to assume the role of the teacher. He succeeds in seducing him into refuting the vulgar opinion, and thus into proving that tyrannical life, and hence his own life, is extremely unhappy. Hiero vindicates his superiority by winning this argument, which, so far as its content is concerned, would be merely depressing for him: by proving that he is extremely unhappy, he proves that he is wiser than the wise Simonides. Yet his victory is his defeat. By appealing to the tyrant’s interest in superiority, or desire for victory, Simonides brings about the tyrant’s spontaneous and almost joyful recognition of all the shortcomings of his life and therewith a situation in which the offering of advice is the act, not of an awkward schoolmaster, but of a humane poet. And besides, in the moment that Hiero becomes aware of his having walked straight into the trap which Simonides had so ingeniously and so charmingly set for him, he will be more convinced than ever before of Simonides’ wisdom.
Psalm 118:22. ↩