Thread: First lucid, short but sweet?

Ok this is about my second post here, my first being a long long time ago, but now I'm back. For a little background, I have considerably bad dream recall, but I am now trying to improve after having my intrest piqued by watching waking life again in philosophy class.
So it was with this complete lack of experience that a couple of weeks ago I had my first, and completely accidental lucid experience. It all started with me being completely non-lucid, sitting quietly and following the conversation at my sisters apartment. Of course as it is with my dreams the apartment was nothing like it should have looked, but I knew where I was. There were several of her friends over and I was getting slightly bored with the conversation, so I got up to go to the bathroom. In the bathroom, I met my best friend, who had not been there prior but it did not yet seem out of the ordinary. It was a bathroom with two sinks, so we both proceeded to brush our teeth or something of the like, talking about the party. I went to light a candle in front of me, for no apparent reason, when I realised my lighter was in the other room.
"Oh well, who cares if I don't have my lighter, it's only a dream anyway," I said. This was proceeded with the train of thought "OH HELL, I'm dreaming! OK OK don't think of anything bad, it might turn into a nightmare! Dam, I cant think of anything good to think of!" followed by similar panick for a couple of seconds. I looked up, seing my friend was still there and being dissapointed that here I was in a lucid dream and there wasn't even a girl or someone new to have a fun adventure with. This was answered with the notion that I could just change it to anyone I wanted. So first try, I look away, and look back to only half sucess, because there was a girl there but it was a cartoon. One more try, and sucess, Horray! I thought. Then I promtly woke up.
It was very interesting, and also very frustrating. I found it intrigueing that I wasn't tripped off by anything to become lucid, but somehow developed the notion in the back of my head for the whole dream, choosing to remember it at a seemingly arbitrary point. It was lots of fun though and since then my dreams have gone back to normal, with some short nonsensical ones during the week and long fun adventures on weekend mornings. I will soon try to work on techniques and so on, but for now I'm interested to hear what people think.