from arduino into processing

is not as simple as I first thought it would be. This is for the light sensor I will be using in my final piece.

I've been trying two approaches, the first one getting processing to hijack the serial communication that the lilypad sends to arduino, to see the values the light sensor sends back. This was a bit weird, the values in processing were quite different and didn't make much sense, there didn't seem to be any correlation between the numbers I was seeing and the changes in light.

I've then been looking into firmata, which allows you to program the arduino board from processing itself, but this method recieved even stranger results, this time only printing out 0. It seemed to be receiving a signal from the light sensor but that was only to say that there was no light. I've found someone with a similar problem on the processing forum, so hopefully they'll be able to help me, but it's confusing me at the moment.