Billy is Dreaming

In chapter four, I believe I have found evidence that when Billy 'timetravels' he is actually just dreaming. For example, on his daughters supposed wedding night, he was jiggled to sleep by Magic Fingers. This jiggling could be the rocking and movement of the boxcar he is locked in, as the train moves slowly down the track. Also, it makes a refrence to the "gaily striped tent in Billy's backyard" (91), in which the wedding had taken place. The tent had been striped with the colors of orange and black. Interestingly enough, the locomotive and the last car of each train he had seen, had been "marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes - that it was carrying prisoners of war" (88).
The next example that supports the theory of his dreaming, are the words ivory and blue. Supposedly, after Billy gets out of bed to go meet the Tralfamadorians, he looks down at his bare feet, and they are described as ivory and blue. Later on in the chapter, after Billy's boxcar door is opened, the author delineates Billy "lying at an angle on the corner brace, self crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill ventilator" (101). Was it just a coincidence that these two depictions should be exactly the same? I think not. I believe that whenever Billy is experiencing pain or discomfort in life, he dreams himself into a different, more interesting world, in order to comfort or cope with the situation. Although he seems to have no control over his "timetravels" I think that his brain uses certain things that had attracted his attention earlier in his experiences, to play out a story in his head.