If you've just gotten your village (or have under 8 villagers) there's an easy way to get your dreamies though it does take a lot of resetting and rebooting. Not sure if this is the main thread, but it's the same method I (tried to) use:
http://www.belltreeforums.com/showthread.php?68222-quot-Controlling-quot-where-houses-appear
Basically, on the day you expect a new villager to show up, you start with a new character and check if the move-in is your dreamie. If it isn't, then reset and try again. The game will try to give you villagers from personalities that you still don't have (if you don't have a smug villager yet, all possible moveins will be from the smug personality pool) so it's a bit easier to reset for villagers of that personality type.
I was able to get Julian, Frita and Carmen by this method. Though I was originally looking for Ruby, so it's kind of a skewed success story -__-
Another method of having dreamies, one which has worked for me reasonably well, is by using your
campsite. There's an (admittedly very small chance) of your dreamie appearing in your campsite. If you have space in your village you *can* adopt them. So what I did was constantly reset and load with a new character until the villager I wanted showed up in the campsite. I managed to adopt Pietro (who nearly gave me a heart attack) Chief, and Willow this way.
e: Also, don't forget to check other places for villager trades! Tumblr (
http://villageradopt.tumblr.com seems to be the most popular) and Reddit (
http://www.reddit.com/r/AdoptMyVillager/) are the best places to look for imo.
e: Oops, I was thinking of
http://villagertrade.tumblr.com, not villageradopt. Though the latter one is also good since they offer free adoptions.