Top Ten: Dramatic Dreams

Along with Dated Disco scenes, drug trips or dream sequences allowed directors' imaginations to run frighteningly out of control, leaving behind reality, credibility and even good taste at times. Here are ten that are hard to forget.

1. Joan Ferguson (413)
Undoubtedly the weirdest and most hilarious of all the hallucination sequences in Prisoner. Joan was forced to take LSD, and when she came round afterwards, discovered she had inadvertently butchered her beloved Rottweiler with a pair of scissors. In the meantime, she witnessed the spectacle of prisoners with whitened faces running towards the camera, a masked hangman, and Meg sprayed gold with a judge's wig on.

2. Julie Egbert (625)
After being hit on the head by Kath Maxwell (and rendered instantly unconscious of course), Julie was given some LSD. Her trip not only featured awful synthesizer snake-charmer music, but Aunty Ida in a fright mask (or could it have been Marie Winter without any make-up?) and Steve Ryan as a muscular pin-up poster. Steve also appeared in a tuxedo and a embarrassingly bad posh accent, with his mother bedecked in jewellery and looking like a Christmas tree, while the two were bathed in a curious Ready Brek glow. The sheer awfulness of the experience seemed to drive poor chookie to hiding in the waste bin outside, where she very nearly got crushed to death.

3. Myra Desmond (543)
The anti-drugs-Top-Dog-gets-slipped-dope storyline was not a new one (it had already been done with Bea and the Barnhurst mushrooms), but this thankfully came at a time when Myra seemed to have little else to do other than moan a lot and look miserable. So within minutes, it all went very "woop-woop-wooooooop" (nice to see the symptoms of taking acid are the same as having a brain tumour, if the sound effects are anything to go by). Classic bizarre moments include the inexplicable putty-faced Dennis, which might have been meant to horrify, had it not been so amusing.

4. Hannah Geldschmidt (452)
Undoubtedly the most politically incorrect dream featured Joan as a Nazi concentration camp guard, stubbing her cigarette into the hand of Hannah as a child, during a strange storyline that seemed a bit confused about what decade it was set in.

5. Mum Brooks (005)
Far more disturbing than Myra's vision of a mutilated officer, or Julie's image of a haggard inmate, was Mum's dream of the Wentworth she had left behind, with a cheesy-grinning Meg. Enough to make anyone wake up in a cold sweat.

6. Anne Griffin (163)
Already more than a bit dotty, Anne chirped on and on about Mee-gan her friend.. or was it Mee-gan her baby..? The climax of tasteless unintentional comedy came when she hallucinated and saw a baby floating in suspended animation in one of the dryers.

7. David Adams (580)
There was little doubt that this was a dream sequence, because the lens was smothered in about an inch of Vaseline, and there was plinky-plonky sci-fi music all over the place. Eve Wilder appeared in the dream as the object of his desires, with even more make-up than usual (though sadly without the previously-seen frilly pink maternity frock that someone in the wardrobe section seemed to have mistaken for a sexy nightie). Thankfully David woke up before Eve could purr more "Dayvud.. Daaayvud"s than were strictly healthy.

8. Marlene Warren (528)
Poor Marlene, about to marry Matt, and still desperately trying to appear less annoying to viewers. After the embarrassment of the comedy cockroach racing, and the luke-warm humour of the diet attempt, the nearest she got to funny was her pre-marital dream. Standing in a dark room, surrounded by gothic candlesticks, and billowing atmospheric smoke (perhaps Colleen Powell was having a cigarette break just off camera) her dress was ripped and torn before our very eyes.

9. Lainie Dobson (363)
After an acid trip turned bad, Lainie decided to try and cut her tattoos out with a blade, made from the sort of handy glass mirrors you are bound to see lying around in high security prisons. But not before the effects department had some fun with the usual burst of whiny electronic sci fi music and a distorted face image.

10. Lou Kelly (610)
While on the run, Lou took shelter with Alice's mother and brother on their farm. While there, she had a bizarre dream where she was attacked by a chainsaw-wielding madman in platform shoes walking in through a smoke-filled entrance..
"And tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be.. Leatherface from the Chainsaw Massacre film.."