Vonnegut also creates a curious distinction between true
time travel and dreams. He tells us that “Billy was unconscious
for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some
of them true. The true things were time-travel.” This last sentence
suggests an interpretation of Billy’s spastic tripping through time
that saves him from a verdict of insanity. Instead, we can understand
his time travel as dreams about his real life. Billy, like most
people, has some dreams that are like memories of real-life events
and some that are fantastical fabrications. Time travel may just
be a label for the dreams about real-life events to suggest how
powerful these dreams are. If we take this interpretation to its
logical conclusion, most of Slaughterhouse-Five would
qualify as one big dream in Billy’s head. Of course, we may still
believe that Billy has a sleep disorder if he can drift off into
dreams while standing up in the forest, standing behind his optometer
at work, speaking to the Lions Club, or visiting the bathroom after
making love to his wife on their wedding night. Over the course
of the novel, we actually encounter very few dreams that would not
qualify as time travel. These include the time that Billy dreams
he is a giraffe and the occasion on which he daydreams about doing
tricks for a crowd by sliding around on a smooth floor in gym socks.
