By means of a collage of ethnographic documents and musical footage, this aims at showing the various manifestations of the states of trance throughout history and the world. Examples ranging from the victims of tarantism in southern Italy to religious rites of black Africa, Jimi Hendrix' concerts to modern-day raves, the possession trance of Brazil to the therapeutic trance of the shamans, from the whirling dervishes to the Greek dancers who tread on hot coals, portray the characteristics of the state of trance as a mean of expression and mental physical release, of union with a divinity and cure of illness, but above all as a altered state of consciousness and path leading to ecstasy.