Strange dreams

First of all! hak42 - OMG my kanji dictionary rocks in all possible
ways! Thank you SO MUCH! It has thousands more entries than my little
learner's dictionary, but it's the same editor, so I mostly know how to
use it already. And it has all sorts of new little nifty things in the
entries, like what the Chinese equivalents of the Japanese kanji are,
and what each kanji looks like if it's been handwritten and if it's
been written as calligraphy. It's SO COOL. *dances about in academic
joy*

So anyway, I had a very weird dream last night with an interesting plot concept and some helpful Alan Rickman.

In
my dream, I was this little girl who was running around in a city with
my younger sister. It was a very old, very big city, with brick and
stone buildings and shops and millions of people all over the place. It
was built on a hill, and we were trying to get away from someone and
get to the bottom of the hill. So I took my sister's hand and darted
into this shop, in which we ran down a lot of wooden stairs and tried
not to knock anything expensive over. We came out near the bottom in
another shop, where Alan Rickman was (only it wasn't HIM... it was a
character he was playing, you know? It was like this was a movie) with
his wife. He had black hair that was cut short, and was wearing
nineteeth-century type clothes. We ducked past him and he kind of went
O.o at there being tiny kids running around alone in this shop, and we
went out into this alley.

At the end of the alley it opened up
and we could see this landscape, beautiful and green with a white
fortress nestled in some hills. When we got there, though, we realized
that it was the place we were trying to get away from, and the end of
the alley was sort of a portal - only it was a painting - to another
world. Then we realized that this city was a painting, too, and somehow
we'd gotten inside it, and this portal was the only way out... but at
the moment, it was set to a painting into which we didn't want to go.
So we were panicking, but then Alan Rickman-character showed up behind
us and asked us what was wrong. When we told him, his wife went over
and touched the portal at the end of the alley. It looked just like she
touched the air, but then it started rippling, and it changed to
another scene. We immediately recognized this as our home, and we
thanked them and jumped through.

When we got there, though, we
weren't at home but where the painting had been placed, which was on
this little island. But we were in the right world, so it was all
right. The island had a tree on it that was all... well, it's hard to
describe, but it was as if the painted tree was made real, and so it
didn't look like a real tree... but kind of like a plastic or plaster
tree that was molded to look like the way the artist had painted it. It
was all brown and orange and had ridges on it where the brushmarks
were. The water was clear, though, not blue paint or anything, but
under it the rocks were all made out of the same material as the tree,
and ridged by the brushstrokes. We played around in the water a while,
and found some other kids to play with, and the dream ended there.