I always thought that lucid dreams were very fuzzy and didn't mimic real life too much. But last night I had my first lucid dream and I was astonished by how real it was. The dream began with me standing on a sidewalk of a busy city. I looked down at the ground and saw a small creature with red fur. I knew that no animal like this exists so i began lucid dreaming! I was so in shock that I didn't try anything crazy. I stayed on the sidewalk, feeling the ground and the window pane of the store behind me. I petted the little creature too. Then everything faded away so I started spinning. When I stopped spinning I was in my apartment with my roommate. We were both sitting at our computers. I wanted to scream out "I'm dreaming!" but it was so real that I was afraid that maybe I wasn't dreaming and my roommate would think I was crazy. But I looked at my hands and they were shapeshifting so I grabbed my roommate and started telling him how we were dreaming. He denied it, but I showed him my hands and then he believed me, but he wasn't too excited. One weird thing to note was that, before I had gone to bed I had made a poster that says "YOU ARE DREAMING" and posted it above my bed. In my dream though I looked at the wall where the poster should have been but it was gone. I thought that was cool. Finally I saw another poster in my room with some writing on it which was written in french. I don't understand french so I scrambled to write down what it said so I could translate it later. Of course I wrote it down in my dream so when I woke up shortly after, I lost the message.

My question is, can lucid dreams go for a long time? This dream felt like it lasted maybe 2 minutes because everything happened so fast. It was upsetting that it ended so quickly. I want to get to the point where I can carry out experiments without having the hassle of a time constraint. What can you guys tell me about this?