I’m sure back when 15x10 aired, I was not alone in this, but readers, when I saw this scene, I screamed. Like, alarm the neighbors kind of screaming. This is - and it’s 100% subtextual but there is no earthly way this could be overinterpreted - a clear statement that the writers want to give us “canon Destiel”. (If anything it was underinterpreted by the audience - on Twitter, you could tell who was not used to examining subtext because they were very confused about why it was there.)
We’re seeing, essentially, a drug trip - Garth has just given Dean a good dose of laughing gas, and sends him on his way. “Let the gas do its thing… everything’s fine…” So (in the way film handles these things) we are accessing Dean’s subconscious, perhaps things he hides from himself - but Garth is reassuring us, we’re gonna like this.
The scene is shot in black and white, to old-timey music, in old-fashioned costumes. It evokes the Motion Picture Production Code (or the “Hays Code”), a semi-voluntary (in that you could ignore it but no reputable theater would show your film if you did) system of censorship designed to impose moral standards on film. Among the things forbidden? “Excessively lustful” sexual content - which means filmmakers got really good at finding ways to express sexual content via visual euphemism. Ways like watching fireworks together. Ways like… dancing. Hold that thought.
Dean is venturing into some territory that’s uncomfortable for him. He’s not sure what he’s doing. But Garth appears and offers to demonstrate. Narratively, Garth has been used to show us what Dean could be if he would get out of his own way: he’s well-adjusted, content, confident without being overconfident, unafraid of showing the world his internal softness, unashamed of what and who he loves. Garth is telling Dean: Drop the front, let the real you shine - and then he vanishes, and Dean tosses the prop away; he can trust himself, he’s got this.
He dances around the room by himself for a bit, but he’s looking for something - a partner. (Dean has been dissatisfied with the ‘unattached drifter’ lifestyle for quite a while - he maybe first expressed this in “Rock and a Hard Place”, but there was a moment in “Baby” that made the point outright, if indirectly.) When he finds someone to dance with… it’s a lamp. There was a time when I could have quoted you chapter and verse on “lamps, the sun, and other light sources as a stand-in for Cas” in the show’s language of symbolism; my helpful friends came up with this, in which light was used to hold space for Cas and highlight his absence from a scene. Trust me that the lamp is a stand-in for Cas, and at a minimum the audience is being invited to imagine who that lamp might represent…
Then there’s the song: “Let’s Misbehave”, originally written by Cole Porter - we can’t know how he would label himself if he were alive today, but it’s known that he was married to a woman while also having male lovers so “bisexual” is at least in the neighborhood of right. As he closes out the dance with the lamp by blowing it a kiss, we hear…
They say the Spring
Means just one thing to little lovebirds
We’re not above birds
Let’s misbehave
and then Dean dances his way up the stairs to the top of the map table where he stands, rapturous, in a beam of light: his highest bliss, his happiness, his heaven, and if the light was holding space for Cas in the past, that space is now right where Dean is.
…so the tl; dr on the whole scene: they have used tap dancing (symbolic of sex) with a lamp (symbolic of Cas) to “Let’s Misbehave” (not symbolic so much as just straight up about sex) to tell us that among Dean’s deepest desires is a relationship with Cas - or turn the decoder ring one click to the left and they’re simultaneously tapdancing around (i.e. addressing indirectly) and hanging a lampshade on Dean’s desire for a life partner. They bring this up again at the end of the episode: Garth and Bess are dancing together while Sam and Dean look on wistfully, and Dean comments, “You know, I always thought I could be a good dancer if I wanted to be.” - a reference both to the dream sequence and to the domestic contentment they’re watching.
(The caveat I want to hang on all this is that if you turn the decoder ring one more click and then look at the Hays Code again, they may be telling us about Network Meddling: we would like to give you an explicit Dean/Cas romance but someone higher up the food chain has shut us down. The caveat to that caveat is that they’re willing to misbehave. ;) )
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