Beyond the Button

«Beyond the Button» is an illustrated dream dictionary about a journey into the consciousness of someone who falls asleep with a high fever the night before their wedding. An ordinary button becomes a conduit into a world of distorted spaces, changing faces, and absurd events. Through surreal illustrations and scientific facts, the book explores the mechanisms of dreaming and the peculiarities of the sleeping brain.

1. The Influence of Stress on Dreams—How anxieties and unfinished business manifest in dream content.
2. Brain Activity During Sleep—How memories are processed and consolidated.
3. Dream Formation—Why familiar objects, people, and events appear in dreams.
4. Hypnagogic Imagery—Why strange visions occur while falling asleep.
5. Spatial Distortion—Why rooms change shape and spaces connect impossibly in a dream.
6. Change in Object Scale—Why objects may appear gigantic or tiny.
7. Temporal Distortion—Why events in a dream disrupt the usual chronology.
8. Changes in Faces and Personalities—Why familiar people may look different.
9. First-Person and Third-Person Dreaming—Why a person sometimes observes themselves from the outside.
10. Fever Dreams—How high body temperature relates to the strangeness and emotional coloring of dreams.
11. Fear and Nightmares—Why strong emotions and feelings of threat arise in dreams.
12. Disruption of Dream Logic—Why impossible events feel normal.
13. Lucid Dreaming—How a person realizes they are dreaming, and why they cannot always control what happens.
14. False Awakenings—Why it sometimes feels like the dream has ended, even though the person is still sleeping.
15. Dream Forgetting—Why only isolated images remain in memory after waking up.