Dreams in literature - a nightmarish quiz!

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Photograph: REX/Courtesy Everett Collection

1. Which literary softie said: “I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time."

   1. Winnie-the-Pooh

   2. Ron Weasley

   3. The BFG

   4. Moominmama

2. “Last night, I dreamed I went to…”

   1. Brideshead

   2. Hogwarts

   3. The Lighthouse

   4. Manderley

3. 

   In War and Peace, what is is the dream that makes Pierre assess his "evil passions"?

   1. He gets lost in a blizzard

   2. He’s attacked by dogs

   3. He runs out of wine

   4. He straps a bear to a policeman

4. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life” is a quote from which influential study?

   1. Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

   2. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

   3. The Republic by Plato

   4. My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

5. Which poet “spread my dreams under your feet”?

   1. WB Yeats

   2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

   3. William Wordsworth

   4. Sylvia Plath

6. 

   In Homer’s Iliad, Zeus uses a false dream to inspire who to what?

   1. Agamemnon to attack Troy

   2. Achilles to kill Hector

   3. Helen of Troy to throw a hissy fit

   4. Aphrodite to fall in love with a donkey

7. Which character in a Russian novel dreams about a scruffy old peasant muttering to himself in French?

   1. Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls

   2. Yuri Zhivago in Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago

   3. Vronsky in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

   4. Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

8. “I had my railway dream instead. Changing trains at Birmingham, some time during the war… A timetable I couldn’t read, a blur of figures. No hope anywhere; no more trains; desolation, darkness. You’d think such a dream would realise when it had made its point?” Which novel’s narrator has grown weary of his unconscious mind?

   1. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

   2. The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

   3. Saturday by Ian McEwan

   4. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

9. 

   In Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman, what is not an alternate name for the main character Dream?

   1. Morpheus

   2. Oneiros

   3. The Cat of Dreams

   4. Puck

10. Which American writer said: “Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely"?

    1. F Scott Fitzgerald

    2. Emily Dickinson

    3. William Faulkner

    4. Henry David Thoreau

11. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” Which wise wizard said this?

    1. Gandalf

    2. Albus Dumbledore

    3. The Wizard of Oz

    4. Harry Dresden

12. Dreams inspired which of these pieces of literature?

    1. Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    2. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

    3. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

    4. All of the above

Solutions

1:A, 2:D, 3:B, 4:B, 5:A, 6:A, 7:C, 8:D, 9:D, 10:C, 11:B, 12:D - All of the above

Scores