NOTES for Gen 41:1-24
Pharaoh too sees prophetic dreams. After all, God leaves no one without support, and if a person cannot hear Him otherwise, He often uses dreams as a last resort. Here, however, it is important to take into account the difference between a dream as such and what is usually called "subtle sleep": an intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness, for which the Hebrew Bible has a special word.
The state of "subtle sleep" more closely resembles visions in the strict sense, like those prophets see, while a person experiences a prophetic dream precisely as a dream: it resembles sleep, though it has some significant differences from it. The main difference is that during the dream a person is quite clearly aware of himself; he usually does not perceive his state as sleep, and yet he does not wake up (in ordinary sleep, a single thought that one is sleeping immediately leads to waking). Often during a dream a person can even remember certain events that happened to him while awake. In addition, during a dream, especially a prophetic one, the sleeper's perceptions are usually sharpened, so that he experiences everything happening to him more fully and clearly, and the actions themselves inside such a dream turn out to be entirely meaningful. They, like the scenes unfolding at the same time, may be strange and unusual, but at the same time quite logical, and within the scenes themselves quite natural and organic.
Something like this is exactly what Pharaoh sees, just as earlier the cupbearer and the baker did, and Joseph himself as well. Understanding what was seen is another matter: logic alone is not enough to understand a dream; it must be grasped in its wholeness, grasped directly and not through reflection. Such understanding is impossible without revelation; that is why there are far more people who see dreams than interpreters (we are speaking, of course, of true interpreters, not fantasists who base themselves on their own rather arbitrary associations, like those that fill popular dream books). And so it happened that now Pharaoh himself needed an interpreter: he understood at once that what he had seen was not an ordinary dream, but precisely a prophetic dream.