I'm a newbie here too, but I believe I understand the basics well enough to answer your questions.

1) Yes, you are lucid if you realize that you are in a dream.
2) Yes, you can become lucid in any dream with practice. You may also learn to lengthen lucid dreams and advance your ability to control them.

There are a variety of methods and ideas concerning lucid dreaming, and this site is a fantastic resource. The first thing you need to do, as I understand it, to become lucid more often is to keep a dream journal. The first thing you should do when waking up is think about your dreams and write them down/type them up. That will change depending on your plans (if you wake up during the night with a dream, you might write it down, but you might also use it to achieve a DEILD).

Read through the tutorial section. Read anywhere on this site. It's fantastic.