This brief pictorial survey of dance illustrates clearly the differences between the first two dreams of my patient and the last one. Since dance itself is a non-verbal expression of meaning, perhaps the visual imagery found in the ARAS slides is a far better mode of amplification of the metaphor than words could ever be.
 
What have we seen about dance in the western world in this very limited presentation? We have seen dance as mimetic and magical for early man, representing his kinship with animals and with his own animal nature in which he lived in harmony and comfort. We have seen dance as sacred, whether in its orgiastic form of frenzied possession by the god with the accompanying loss of ego, or in the manifestation of dancing before, or for, or in honour of the god, or God, as in the ecstatic dances and in the musicians and dancers before King David blessed by the golden Hand of God.
 
Sometime during the Middle Ages the sense of dance as sacred disappeared from our western European culture. Why is it, we may ask ourselves, that both dance and drama-originally sacred activities in our heritage, have become entirely secularised, when dance and drama are still living manifestations of the sacred in many other parts of the world? Perhaps they are not lost forever, but hidden in the maze of labyrinth of the western psyche from whence they venture forth in our dreams. This is supported both by the images and by the sequence of my patient's dream images.