According to new studies, dreams can fix your bad moods each night - and if you're depressed, dreams may predict whether you'll recover more quickly. It is natural to wake up in the morning with a sunny outlook, relieved of the previous evening's worries. In fact, studies show that a solid night of sleep improves moods in healthy individuals. But sleep's effects on healthy and depressed people are as different as night and day. People who are seriously depressed actually feel worse after sleeping, since they have more abstract, confusing dreams. Research led Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the Sleep Research Center at Rush-Presbyterian-St.Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, to wonder how dreams allow our brains to repair our moods - and why this feel-good mechanism doesn't seem to work in the seriously depressed.