hey, just wanted to post this article i found on the internet.

"One of the biggest clues to depression may lie in readiness for dream sleep. Normal sleep has a well-defined architecture. EEG studies show that four or five times a night, we cycle through several periods of deepening sleep, then burst into dream sleep, marked by dramatic brain activity and rapid eye movements (along with body-muscle paralysis). But this architecture of sleep goes awry in about 30% of the depressed.

They are on a fast track to dreamland, which sounds like a good thing, but isn't. The time from the first stage of deepening sleep to REM sleep is truncated. Recent studies have shown that people with shortened REM latency often have many first-degree relatives with depression."

full article:
http://health.yahoo.com/health/centers/depression/2943