meditation and depression

When I told my husband that I felt a bit depressed some time ago, his response was that "in the olden days they would have taken women like you outside and beaten them!" Fortunately I found this very funny and it broke right through the rather less illuminated state of mind and made me laugh.
The interesting thing about this story though is that changing the mind through changing its state is a way to shift depression.  Meditation techniques have become part of therapies offered to people suffering from depression,
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/12December/Pages/Meditationanddepression.aspx.
This morning I woke from a dream in which I was running (not something I find easy for long) miles and miles round London because I had left my keys behind and had no telephone and needed to find my husband.  Up Richmond Hill I went, no problem, running for what seemed like hours and even in the dream I was rather pleased that I was so fit until I found him, oh relief, and asked for a handkerchief whereupon he gave me a child's shoe.  Work that one out!  It was such heaven to get out of that bed of dream and into a more real and stable world.  Meditation is like that sometimes, you can leave the curious world of thoughts and activity behind and come to a much more real state where your mind surrenders to whatever is behind it.  This is a photograph of my husband in his corner of heaven.