Thanks to a new technology that allows scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work, the mystery of dreams is now closer than ever to resolution. Although there are still many more questions than answers, researchers are now able to see how different parts of the brain work at night, and they are figuring out how that division of labor influences our dreams.

The long-range goal of dream research is a comprehensive explanation of the connections between sleeping and waking, a multidimensional picture of consciousness and thought 24 hours a day. But, as Senior Editor Barbara Kantrowitz and Chicago Correspondent Karen Springen report in the August 9 Newsweek cover story The Mystery of Dreams, dream science is helping us understand and treat depression, posttraumatic stress, anxiety and a whole range of other problems. Neuroscientists are gleaning insights into how we learn by studying the physiology of dreaming in adults and children.

Kantrowitz and Springen examine the latest research on dreams and how psychologists are also studying dreams to learn how both ordinary people and great artists resolve problems in their life and work by "sleeping on it." "If you're going to understand human behavior," Rosalind Cartwright, a chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, tells Newsweek, "here's a big piece of it. Dreaming is our own storytelling time-to help us know who we are, where we're going and how we're going to get there."

The Newsweek cover package also includes a report about how insomnia can disrupt your night and dreams and, later, your day. When worries wake you in the middle of a REM cycle, Springen reports, issues that might have been resolved through dreams are left hanging. Dreams tend to get more positive as the night wears on, and waking up too soon interrupts this process. "People who are sleep deprived are often irritable," Cartwright says. "They haven't worked through the bad feelings."