In chapter five of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is “put to a bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine” (p. 94). Another soldier named Edgar Derby volunteers to watch over him while he is strapped down and asleep. The drug causes Billy to have an elaborate dream involving giraffes wandering around in a garden.
In the dream, Billy is a giraffe himself, and the other animals have accepted him as such, believing that he poses them no harm. While in this garden of his dream, he wanders around the gravel paths of the garden, pausing to eat some sugar pears from the trees and receive kisses from the female giraffes using their “long, muscular upper lips which they could shape like the bells of bulges” (p. 94–95).
Eventually, the dream involving the giraffes in the garden ends, although Billy remains asleep, “and then he traveled in time” (p. 95). It is unclear if this mention of time travel is referring to another dream that Billy begins to experience or if this is a continuation of the book’s bizarre narrative.
In Chapter Five of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy has a very strange morphine dream in which he sees a garden with giraffes wandering around on gravel paths in it. In this dream, Billy is also a giraffe, and he is accepted by the other giraffes as one of their kind. Two of the female giraffes approach Billy and then kiss him on the lips.
This dream seems to play off of the theme of alienation that is present within the novel. Due to his time-traveling tendencies, Billy is constantly out of sync with the rest of the world and is, thus, a bit of an outcast. However, in this dream, Billy is able to find a group of his own, albeit one consisting of very strange, odd-looking creatures! He may never be accepted by normal society, but in his dream he finds there is a "tribe" for him out there somewhere.
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