10 Star Trek Episodes That Are Beyond Words

9. One Moon Circles

It's never going to go well when Deanna Troi watches a drifting starship with that look on her face.

When an away team investigates the USS Brattain in the episode Night Terrors, they find the crew dead...think The Naked Now, but without the fun bits. And lo and behold, it's not long before the Enterprise starts behaving like a ghost ship.

Phantom voices, hallucinations, memory loss, paranoia...that nightmare-inducing scene where Crusher is surrounded by risen corpses. All in all, you don't want to watch this episode before bedtime.

With engines offline, there's no escape. It's up to Troi to discover the meaning of her recurring dream before it's too late: floating through a murky vortex, surrounded by voices droning 'eyes in the dark' and 'one moon circles'. But finally she realises...it's a call for help. Well, more precisely, it's a call for hydrogen.

The concept works so well because it isn't just some words to decode. It's a kaleidoscope of imagery, instinct and voices that she has to bring into focus. Now, it's not the most reliable or efficient means of communication, but the idea of using dreams to convey messages is truly intriguing. We all like to muse on what our dreams might mean, and Night Terrors plays on our intuition that even our nightmares might be trying to tell us something.