Hey all!
My name's Meidi (yes, for real), I'm 19-going-on-20 and I live in Sweden. My LD history is a bit strange; the first lucid dream I had was when I was 9-ish and I had a dream that I realized was a dream. Then I jumped from the balcony and flew around a little (since I thought to myself that I could do anything I wanted without getting hurt) before eventually waking up.

Then, years passed...and sometime in 2004 I watched Waking Life (which I'm sure many, if not all of us have done). This triggered my interest for lucid dreaming even more, but I found it hard to have one on my own (though, it happened sporadically). I've always had a very active dream life, which is good AND bad - at the same time as I can have beautiful dreams in which I play music with colors or visit other, spectactular worlds, I'm very prone to gore-tastic nightmares. Think: watching people you love die over and over again in a time-loop, pulling charred bodies out of kitchen ovens, being horribly mutilated...etc. I see this subconscious activity as something fundamentally good, anyway (even though it made me want to not ever dream again for a while), since I can often remember my dreams very vividly and in great detail.

Now, I'm not that great at routines, so back in 2004 I never really started keeping a dream journal or started checking for dream signs in real life. These past two years my LD interest has been on and off, until some time a few months ago when I started having lucid dreams all by myself. At first they were horrible, as I kinda went lucid in the middle of a nightmare and didn't really know what to do. I tried to wake myself up several times, but failed (it never occurred to me in that mindset that I could actually control my surroundings, I was too terrified I guess). But something's definitely happening in my subconscious right now.

I've had two lucid dreams just this past week, a couple of false awakenings, and a number of near-lucid experiences. What I call near-lucid is talking to a dream character about how "this may very well be a dream" and them basically saying something along the lines of "bah, humbug". Damn you, DCs! Lol. Anyway, it's come to the point where I regularly ask myself in dreams whether I'm dreaming or not (most often I come to the conclusion that I'm not dreaming, wtf?). I really want to try and investigate this newfound ability further, et voilą - here I am!

Sorry about the ginormous post. You'll survive.