Back to the drawing board

There's this commercial running locally where a guy just finishes attaching a wall plate to a light switch. He flips the switch on and the doorbell rings. Puzzled look, he flips it off and the doorbell rings again. He opens the front door and pushes the doorbell and hears a whirrring sound behind him. Walking into the hall sees the ceiling fan running, turns it off and that, in turn, turns on the tv. Turning the tv off, again a distant noise... enters the kitchen to see the garbage disposal spewing a fountain into the sink... racing over to turn it off, sees the garage door open as a result... runs to the garage and pushes the button, breathing a sigh of relief that he'd reached the end of the chaos...only to have the automatic sprinklers come on and shower his wife who's working in the garden...

Okay, so yesterday, when I was doing a search for backlighting text, came across a tutorial from Photoshop InDepth that involved the physics of light and how it interacts with objects/surfaces... Well, when I took a look at that and some of the other tutorials on the site, I realized instead of trying to go in and adjust the shadows... tweaking it here or there... I really need to start over, as it were. Go back to the Dream Vacation's .psd file and hide every layer but the wall and floor layer, get the lighting right, then add one element after another tweaking the light/shadow as each interact in the enviroment until it's complete. Like the commercial, there are just so many things wrong that interconnect, that I have to go back to the very start and fix it as I go.

Hopefully in that time, I'll have a solution for the dream sequence as well.