Plot

A young girl lost in the loneliness and boredom of reality finds solace in an ill boy, whom she can visit in a surreal dream world that she drew in her school composition book.

Anna is becoming lost in the loneliness of her own world when she discovers she can visit another, a house she has drawn herself and occupied by a young disabled boy. But as she discovers more of the links between her fantasy world and the mundane present, she is drawn only deeper into a dream turning into a nightmare.—David Carroll <davidc@atom.ansto.gov.au>

On the day of her birthday, Anna plays a prank at school and is expelled from the classroom. Out of the blue, she faints, and her mother Kate is summoned by the principal. While driving to the doctor, Anna tells her mother that her fainting was fake and that she misses her father that is travelling. Kate returns to the school with Anna and after class, Anna meets her friend Sharon and they play hide and seek. Anna faints again in a basement, and the police seek her out and bring her home. Dr. Sarah Nicols sees that she has fever and while Anna sleeps, she dreams with the house she had drawn in a piece of paper and meets a disabled boy called Marc at the window. The feverish Anna continues to dream, blending her drawings and reality with dreams that becomes nightmares.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

While suffering from glandular fever, 11-year-old Anna Madden draws a house. When she falls asleep, she has disturbing dreams in which she finds herself inside the house she has drawn. After she draws a face at the window, in her next dream she finds Marc, a boy who suffers with muscular dystrophy, living in the house. She learns from her doctor that Marc is a real person. She visits the house in her dreams several times, each time adding new things to her drawing which also appear in her dream. First she draws stairs so that she can go up and visit Marc, then adding more items to his room and a fruit tree to the front yard. In the real world, Anna's relationship with her mother is strained by Anna's lying, as well as the lingering pain she feels from her father's long absences for work and his alcoholism.

Anna sketches her father into the drawing so that he can help carry Marc away, but she inadvertently gives him an angry expression which she then crosses out, and the father appears in the dream as a furious, blinded figure with scratch marks over his eyes. After hiding in a closet with Marc, he suggests Anna lie down and mimic the motions she would use to grab the drawing in real life and tear the part of the drawing containing her father out. Anna does so, barely avoiding lighting the paper on fire, and tears her father out of the drawing in her sleep. This does not work, and her father breaks into the closet and carries Anna away before beating her in the chest repeatedly while shouting "Do you know who I am?" at her. Marc musters the strength to attack Anna's father with a hammer, destroying him. Anna wakes up in the hospital, her health having taken a serious turn in her sleep. It is implied that her dream father's attack was mimicking the actions of the ambulance staff administering a heart massage. Anna's doctor tells her that Marc is 'getting better' but Anna sees through her deception, saying that she knows Marc is dying. The doctor is skeptical of Anna's knowledge, but she provides information she could not have know otherwise. Anna asks for her drawing supplies to be brought to the hospital.

While Anna recovers in the hospital, her father returns with her mother to discuss going away on holiday, though Anna is not receptive to her father or the idea of a holiday. She draws a new room for Marc with nicer accommodations, and adds a pencil so that they could add anything they needed while in their dream. When she falls asleep she finds Marc at the lighthouse, seemingly cured of his paralysis and in much better spirits. They spend time together playing on a nearby hill and share a first kiss. Soon after, they discuss drawing a ladder to get down from the cliff to the shore. Marc instead suggests that Anna draw a helicopter, which she declines, saying she doesn't know how. Marc says he can, but insists that he must do it alone in the lighthouse. Anna reluctantly agrees, and Marc enters the lighthouse as Anna tells him "Don't go without me." She soon wakes from hear dream without finding out if Marc had drawn the helicopter.

Anna is discharged from the hospital soon after. Her father reveals to her that he has been given a job in the home office and will not have to go away any more, though Anna still acts coldly towards him. Her father tells her that Anna's doctor said that Marc has passed away. Anna says she already knew. The family goes away on a holiday to the seaside, where Anna is still saddened over Marc's death, though her relationship with her father improves somewhat. After father opens the window in her hotel room, Anna sees the lighthouse from her dream on a nearby cliff. She runs from the hotel by herself, overjoyed, but when she arrives at the lighthouse and calls for Marc repeatedly she finds the door locked and Marc absent. She sits on the step, upset, but finds a note from Marc under a nearby rock. The note shows him and his helicopter, along with a message saying that he can't wait any longer, but he will come back for her if she waits. Anna runs to the nearby cliff and calls to Marc. A helicopter arrives, dropping a ladder. Anna hears Marc calling for her, but then yelling to be careful and to stay away from the cliff. As Anna reaches for the ladder Marc continues to yell for her to be careful, until the helicopter flies away and Anna's mother grabs before she can fall off the cliff. The movie ends with Anna in her mother and father's arms, having come to terms with Marc's death, her relationship with her parents repaired.