Genesis 37:19 Meaning They Said to One Another

To name a brother by his dream is to shrink him to the one thing the fearful mind has decided he is. Looking at another, that mind sees not a living presence but a label, and the label is always an accusation. He becomes his dream so that he can be dismissed, made small enough to attack.

Yet the world itself is the dream, and every figure in it walks in sleep, the accusers no less than the accused. What comes toward these brothers is only another sleeper, a piece of the same mind wearing a name meant to hold him at arm's length. When a mind stops labeling its brother, it stops defending against him, and it can begin to wake.

Brethren: the parts of the mind that defend themselves by naming a brother rather than meeting him Dreamer: the brother reduced to a label, the whole of him replaced by the one thing the fearful mind has decided to see

The dreamer they scorn is the imagination in you, and Joseph is its name here, the power that dreams a world and one day wakes as its maker. The brothers who mock him are your own thoughts and senses, the reasoning faculties that resent the dreamer and would rather be rid of him. Yet the one they reject is the very power that saves and prospers them, for the world they take as solid is as much a dream as the pictures of the night.

Joseph is you asleep, destined to wake as the one who was dreaming all along. What a person imagines and stays loyal to is projected from within and met as his outer life. The dreamer always comes, and the state he holds becomes the world the others must live in.