NOTES for Gen 40:1-23
The gift of prophetic dreams served Joseph well in prison too. Once it had played a cruel joke on him: it was precisely because of this gift that Joseph ended up in Egypt. Whether the joke was cruel, however, is another question. In Egypt Joseph made a rather good career; in his native tribe he could not have counted on anything like it. If anyone played a cruel joke on him, it was his master's wife, though what she did to Joseph is hard to call a joke. As for the dreams, they had led Joseph to Egypt, and now, as he himself hoped, they could help him get out of prison.
Together with Joseph in prison were people of very high rank. The chief cupbearer and the chief baker were by no means servants who waited on Pharaoh at table, although, of course, on especially solemn occasions they could pour Pharaoh a cup of wine or serve freshly baked bread. Their main work, however, was different: they were responsible for supplies to the court, respectively, of wine and bread, or more precisely, wheat and barley. Both positions were, in modern terms, materially responsible ones, so it is not hard to guess the most probable reasons why these men ended up in prison.
Meanwhile the meaning of the dreams they had seen was quite transparent. What may seem strange is only that the gift of such dreams is given even to people who do not think much about God. At least nothing in the biblical account says of the cupbearer and the baker that they were in any measure believers, even in a pagan way, as would have been possible for them in Egypt. A believing and pious Egyptian would hardly have become a thief, for although Egyptian religion, at least in its mass form, was pagan, its moral norms were strict enough.
The point, however, is that God always tries in some way to get through to a person, to convey something to him, even when it would seem that everything is useless because the person is not even thinking about spiritual life. This is where dreams sometimes become the only possible way, for even a person incapable of perceiving anything else can see them and partly understand them. All the more when there is someone nearby who, like Joseph, can help with the interpretation.