Introducing: ME!

Hey guys, for now will go with my handle, call me Bad, BadAss, long coat whatever if you want to shorten it, I use it all over the web on forums and have seen nearly every variation of it :D

So I guess I will give a short Bio then a brief history before diving into why I am here.

I am 24 living in Australia and working as a Chef. (Nice and short :))

As a child I used to have vivid dreams, often starring DCs such as my Father (who was alive but accross the country from me) and recently departed loved ones, including those I had never actually met and only saw in photos. There came a point when I realised I could do things with free will in dreams, normally night mares, the first few I remember realising it was a dream and then waking myself up. I see this is common from what I have read so far on the forums. Later I realised that I could do things within the dream and sort of used to go about doing nothing too out of the ordinary until one time when I fell off a building and flew, after that I used to have them all the time, not really understanding that what I was having were LDs.
Any way a problem arose where sometimes I would dream mundane things that were very familiar and I would become lucid, then do stupid things realising I was dreaming. The problem came when I stopped being able to tell the difference easily between mundane LDs (as they were detailed to a point that at the time I couldn't see much difference at the age) and IRL. Getting into a lot of trouble at school I saw the school psychologist/counsellor, I told her I thought I was dreaming and she taught me a few reality checks the following week. I stopped having them as I matured and stayed out late, worked long hours at a job and generally not getting enough sleep or just getting straight up to the alarm.

The other day I had a massive function at work and pulled a 13 hour shift, afterwards I was exhausted and I slept like a rock. After waking up I was still a little tired so went back to bed and had a vivid dream (WBTB it seems), it wasn't lucid but I decided to try do some reading. I kind of wanted to see if I could do what I used to do as a child but somehow initially thought that it was a childhood thing, lo and behold there is a whole community of people out there who do it regularly for fun and for soul-searching purposes!

So now you know who I am, why I was interested in the topic and why I came here! I have read through a few posts and some of this stuff is getting me quite excited for LDs, especially as an adult as I feel I can turn it into a useful tool for my life.

Thanks for having me!