If the sheaf dream was shocking, the second dream was worse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:9) stays close to the Hebrew: behold, the sun, and the moon, and eleven stars, bowed to me.
The Torah's imagery is cosmic. The sages quickly decoded it. The sun is Jacob, the father. The moon is the mother — either Rachel (already dead, which his father will soon point out) or her handmaid Bilhah, who had raised Joseph. The eleven stars are Joseph's eleven brothers, the other tribes of Israel.
But notice what is missing from the dream: Joseph himself. He is not counted among the stars. He is the one the stars bow to. He has placed himself outside the family's orbit and turned into its center of gravity.
The number eleven is also a tell. There are twelve tribes, counting Joseph. Eleven stars means Joseph has already done the math — he is the twelfth, and the other eleven will circle him. The Zohar, composed much later and published around 1290 CE in Castile, will read this dream as a premonition of the full tribal structure: Joseph would become the viceroy of Egypt, and his own two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, would each become a tribe, bringing the count back to twelve even after Levi was set apart for the priesthood.
Joseph did not know any of this. He only knew he had seen the heavens bow. And like a boy who had just come from the house of study, he did what a scholar does: he told the truth he had been given, and let the family decide what to do with it.