Many years ago Rav Aharon Soloveitchik zt"l spoke at a family simcha and commented as follows:
The brothers of Yosef were upset with him over his two dreams. Their father, Yaakov Avinu, only had one dream - obviously very spiritual in nature - which was all about holy angels. Their brother all of a sudden came up with two dreams: one about the celestial bodies - the sun, the moon and the stars - and the other, very materialistic in nature, which was all about bundles of grain. Yosef’s brothers disapprovingly wondered - where did this gashmius-dige dream come from? It was not in accordance with the family tradition.
But the truth of the matter was that Yaakov Avinu’s dream really consisted of two parts: the ladder in Yaakov’s dream was standing on the earth and its top reached into the heavens. Yosef broke his father’s dream into its two component parts, but in truth both parts were already contained within Yaakov’s dream.
[The Talmud tells us that the tanna R’ Eliezer had a policy not to say anything he hadn’t heard from his rebbeim (Sukkah 28a). In Pirkei D’ Rabbi Eliezer it is stated that R’ Eliezer was such an original thinker that he would develop Torah ideas that no one had heard since the days of maamad Har Sinai. Don’t these two descriptions seem to contradict each other?
Rav Kook suggested that the two passages were not at all contradictory. The tanna R’ Eliezer adopted a policy never to express any original ideas, but he paid close attention to the traditions he had received from his rebbeim and thus he heard more from his rebbeim than his contemporaries. He would always break down the Torah ideas he received from his rebbeim into their component parts, and thereby point out that many additional ideas were implicitly contained within what they had all heard from their rebbeim[1]]
Some individuals had expressed their dissatisfaction with Rav Yoshe Ber’s (his brother) way of thinking. Many felt that their zeideh Rav Chaim only had one dream which was about halacha, and thus questioned where R’ Yosef got this second dream of philosophy. This was not at all part of the family tradition.
Rav Aharon concluded that in his opinion, his brother Rav Yoshe Ber did not add on a new second dream, but merely did as Yosef hatzaddik of old and broke down the traditional dream into its two component parts - halacha and agada.
The Talmud consists of both halacha and agada. The halacha guides us as to how to act, while the agada guides us as to how to think. In every generation we have to present our age-old Torah traditions in a language that will be understood by the masses. Rav Aharon’s brother - Rav Yoshe Ber - was simply translating the haskafot of Chazal into contemporary philosophical jargon. There was only one dream, broken down into its two component parts - "Old wine kept in brand new vessels."
[1] This discussion of R’ Eliezer was not part of Rav Ahahron’s drasha