You May Say I'm A Dreamer, But I'm Not The Only One

I’ve tried to keep my dreams alive as I journeyed through my life. But then I’ll find no difference between dreams and reality. There will be a moment in my life constructed by my dreams, or my dreams would be just part of my life. My conscience will constantly tell me. “Dream as if you’ll live forever, dream as if you’ll die today.” My death will never be a problem, for as when I am dead. My dreams and life will all be gone. With them gone, I’ll have no problem identifying the difference between these two parallel streams in my journey. The problem is, lately I’ve considered death as only a status of “illness” of the human beings and not the end. If I never die I won’t ever find the difference between dreams and reality. At least I don’t have to worry about a third character in my doubt, as Billy Pilgrim does.Not only does Billy lives and dreams but he also time travels. How can we know which of these are the actual moments of Billy’s life? Vonnegut creates a difference between the “true” time travel and the actual dreams. “Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them were true. The true things were time travel. ” (Vonnegut, 157). It is as if his time travel were dreams of his true life, because they happen but at the same time they don’t. Billy does live these moments again when he travels in time, he knows he does and we know that too because he narrates it to us but then again time travel does not happen. In this case it is a part of Billy’s imagination and trauma caused by war that he wishes he could fix. And by time traveling he makes himself believe he can do it.If we look at it one way, we could say the whole book is one big dream in Billy’s head. One dream that has a mixture of both reality and fiction. He (Billy) is telling us his story at war but apart from that he includes or mentions things that don’t have to do with it. Meaning that part of it is true when some portion of it id not. That is why for Billy we could say it is more complicated. I only have to decide weather it’s a dream, did it really happen, or was it a mixture of both. When with Billy its hard to tell if he actually lived it the way he tells it, was it all just a real dream that did not happen, or was it time traveling because Billy wanted to give meaning to that part of his life? In some cases we may know the answer but in others we are left with the doubt to know what it really was. For me it could be a dream, and for you it could be the real thing. We only have memories of the past. Billy has memories of his past, present, and future “Billy with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned-in about thirty more days. ” ( Vonnegut.151) so its harder to know what he dreams or what he lives because what at first was a dreams could become a reality he could encounter later on. Was this all just a dream, or did it really happen?