Any Dream Will Do Trivia Quiz

Answer: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

"Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" is based on the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The story of redemption and forgiveness in the Joseph narrative has long inspired readers in Judaisim, Christianity, Islam, and the cultures they influence. "Into the Woods" takes off from the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm; "Wicked" retells the story of "The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum; and the play "Les Miserables" is based on the novel by Victor Hugo.

Answer: Hamlet

The line appears in Act 3, scene 1 of "Hamlet" as part of the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy spoken by the title character. Dreams are also important in the other three Shakespearean plays that appear as choices. Characters in "Macbeth" are troubled by frightening dreams after they murder the king; in "Julius Caesar" the title character's wife Calpurnia foresees his assassination; and "The Tempest" also contains dreams, and as his actors in the play within a play ends, Prospero speaks the famous line: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" (Act 4, scene 1, lines 136-138).

Answer: Joseph, son of David

On receiving the news that the woman contracted to be his wife is pregnant, Joseph decides at first to quietly send Mary away. In the NRSV, Matthew 1:20 reads: "But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, [King James adds "thou"] do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'" The Gospel of Matthew emphasizes Joseph's descent from the family of King David, and in the Gospel of Luke, this lineage provides the reason for going to Bethlehem to be registered for taxes, allowing Bethlehem rather than Nazareth to be the place of Jesus's birth, in line with Messianic predictions.

Answer: Egypt

In Genesis, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. In Matthew, a different Joseph is told in a dream to take his little family to Egypt for protection, thus avoiding the baby's death in the "Slaughter of the Innocents" ordered by Herod the Great in the Bible story. (In Roman times, a great number of Jews lived in Egypt and other parts of North Africa.) The historical statement "out of Egypt I called my son" in the prophet Hosea 11:1, referring to the exodus from Egypt by the people of Israel as a whole, is thus linked to the person of Jesus by the New Testament writers.

Answer: creation

In the various creation stories from the thousands of years of Australian culture before European contact, ancestral beings came to earth in human form and created life and the land. Ancestors did not leave, but became part of the natural world: trees, rocks and other landforms, planetary bodies, water holes, and especially sacred places. Humans keep in line with this creation through song, dance, painting, and other ceremonies as they walk through the created world.

Answer: Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a friend of Sigmund Freud for six years, beginning in 1906, before their views became too divergent for the friendship to continue. While Freud focused on the family drama of an individual's early life, Jung moved away from sex as the universal explanation for human psychology, moving instead toward a collective unconscious shared by all human beings.

He first proposed the idea of introversion vs. extroversion, and many other concepts still accepted today. Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist, whose ideas are influential in education. Edgar Cayce was an American psychic.

Answer: Edgar Cayce

Born in Kentucky, living in Texas during the 1920s, and spending much of his adult life in Virginia, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) became a popular occult figure. Although he labeled himself as a Christian, Cayce is associated with astral projection, visions of the lost continent of Atlantis, reincarnation, and a patchwork of other nontraditional beliefs. Cayce may have been influenced by the writings of the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), as well as the ideas of Carl Jung. John Edward (born John Edward McGee in 1969) is a psychic who has a television show called "Crossing Over" in which he attempts to unite guests with their dead loved ones. James Randi is a skeptic stage magician who seeks to debunk psychics.

Answer: Cass Elliot

While all of the choices named recorded "Dream a Little Dream of Me" only Cass Elliot sang with The Mamas and the Papas in the 1960s. Cass Elliot was named Ellen Naomi Cohen at the time of her birth in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1941. She died in London in 1974. Struggling with obesity all her life, it is a cruel irony that the presence of a partially eaten ham sandwich in her hotel room at the time of her death led to the urban legend that she died because she choked on a ham sandwich.

The official cause of death was a heart attack, perhaps brought on by intermittent weight losses followed by weight gains.

Answer: The Dream of the Rood

"The Dream of the Rood" is written in Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English. The word "rood" meant "pole" but came to be applied to the cross, specifically the "true cross" on which Christ was crucified. A cross from the early 8th century, which was once in Northumberland but is now in Scotland (the border was moved, not the cross) - the Ruthwell Cross - has lines from the poem carved into the stone in runes.

In the poem, the cross describes how it was cut down, and describes the crucifixion, picturing Jesus as a holy knight.

While Caedmon and Bede were writers of the time period, scholars do not know who wrote this poem.

Answer: Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes reworked the poem "Harlem" - which begins with the lines "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" - several times in the 20th century, and his imagery had great influence, perhaps even on Martin Luther King, Jr., whose famous speech "I Have a Dream" interrogates in a similar way the American Dream so elusive for African Americans. (I originally had a question about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 speech, but that was too easy.) Lorraine Hansberry wrote a play whose title - "A Raisin in the Sun" - was inspired by Langston Hughes's poem and has a similar theme.