This should return the collection containing single list:
dataFrame.select("YOUR_COLUMN_NAME").rdd.map(r => r(0)).collect()
Without the mapping, you just get a Row object, which contains every column from the database.
Keep in mind that this will probably get you a list of Any type. Ïf you want to specify the result type, you can use .asInstanceOf[YOUR_TYPE] in r => r(0).asInstanceOf[YOUR_TYPE] mapping
P.S. due to automatic conversion you can skip the .rdd part.