In the book “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut, a character named Billy Pilgrim seems to be flying through time and moments in his life. The question is, is he truly time traveling or not? I believe that he is just shell shocked and in his mind visiting these moments, not literally reliving them.
Many soldiers in the war ended up being severely damaged psychologically. This was classified as shell-shock. This caused very strange behaviour in many cases, and in one video (that I seem to recall watching in grade ten history class) a grown man was waddling around a mental hospital in a penguin like fashion as others made abnormal sounds. Billy thinking that he is time traveling and being abducted by aliens would make him one of the more normal among the shell-shocked crowd. It may be written to seem so realistic because to Billy, it is. His visions of the Trafamadorians and revisiting various parts of his life may be his mind’s way of sheltering itself from the horrors that he either was or is experiencing. It also makes sense that he claims to have first been abducted during the middle of the war.
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