It just sounds tragic, like "Decades" by Joy Division pumped up on 90s drugs and fatter synths, with the prophetic croon of Ian Curtis replaced by an anonymous Dutch session singer... dark music really, wrapped in plastic, like the feeling at the back of your skull after too many pills...
I once heard a trance version of Japan's "Ghosts".
The melancholic aspect of trance, at least to some degree, comes from the EBM roots. The german trance scene originally developed more or less out of EBM, many of the producers had been part of that eighties german scene (they actually called it "techno" back then), and then got turned over by rave culture, just like b-boys in the UK. And a lot of that darkness and Depeche Mode-ish melancholia went into early trance. That's also why there's often this weird, paradoxical sense of sad euphoria in a lot of this music - not exactly "uplifting", but still strangely glowing.
An interesting transitional record is an album called "Transforming Tune" by Time Modem, an excellent example of that particular kind of german rave that combined ebm, electro and belgian hardcore, and all the same was a kind of proto-trance. It's an album full of techno-futuristic triumphalism as well as an almost defeatist melancholia. The last track (with spoken vocals) is basically about the sadness and loneliness of hiding in your headphones, or in cyberspace, almost directly acknowledging your interpretation of trance from earlier in this thread. They
know that the style they're inventing is totally escapist, but they're unable to take any other way.
If possible, try and hear Paul van Dyks "X-Mix-1 The MFS-TRIP" mix album, made in 1993 exclusively with tracks from MFS, one of the earliest Berlin trance labels; simultaneusly sweetly sad and full of extatic joy. Track titles like "Skysoaring", "Breath of Stars", "High on Hope", "Heaven's Tears" and "How much can you take?" perfectly capture the musics e-fuelled belief. And sure, it's cheap and cheesy and simple, but when have subtlety been necessary to make good rave music?