Joseph's promise to the butler is both specific and ordinary. At the end of three days the memory of thee will come before Pharoh and he will lift up thy head with honour, and restore thee to thy service, and thou wilt give the cup of Pharoh into his hand, according to thy former custom in pouring out for him (Genesis 40:13).
The Aramaic plays on the Hebrew phrase yissa et rosh'kha, he will lift up thy head. Pseudo-Jonathan keeps the ambiguity that the Torah itself is building toward: the same verb, in three days' time, will be used for both the chief butler (lifted up in honor, restored to his office) and the chief baker (lifted up on a gallows, his head removed). The same idiom, two opposite fates.
Bereshit Rabbah 88 dwells on this. Language itself, the Sages teach, is morally neutral. To lift up the head can mean restoration or execution. It can mean to count (as in the census: lift up the head of the children of Israel, Numbers 1:2), or it can mean to elevate to office, or it can mean to take the head. What determines the meaning is not the verb but the life of the person hearing it. The butler's life bends toward wine; the baker's bends toward birds.
Notice also what the Targum adds at the end: according to thy former custom in pouring out for him. The butler will not receive a new job. He will be returned to his old one. The Sages hear in this a small, tender promise about the mercy of restoration — the day of return often looks very much like the day before the fall, only with the interval of the prison silently rewritten into the man.
The takeaway is layered. The same ordinary phrase — lift up the head — describes the best and the worst outcome in the next three days of these two men's lives. What will decide their fate is not the oracle. It is the life each has already lived. The butler's restoration is possible because his dream contained the wine of his office. The baker's execution will be inscribed because his dream contained the birds that eat. Our dreams do not create our endings; they describe them.