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With dreams that look and feel exactly like normal waking life, it is very hard to tell. With lots of experience with dreaming and waking life, there is a subtle difference in the way they feel but it is subtle to be sure. That is why most people’s official lucid dream either starts with something that does not happen in normal life or they get an intuition that they are dreaming and ‘make’ extraordinary things happen.
Unfortunately this is all further complicated as the same problem occurs distinguishing dreaming from other states such as visions, NDE, or spontaneous OBE.
I can tell you that each has different properties and with experience can be sorted out most of the time.
An real life analog might help here. When you do air travel, how do you know which city you arrived in? Normally, you assume the pilot did his job and told you the truth. But what if stepping off the plane you don’t recognize the airport? How do you know? Even worse you have been to the intended city before but you don’t recognize anything? Perhaps they remodeled the terminal. Perhaps they diverted to another airport and you were not listening. Maybe you fell asleep in route and are dreaming even now. In these cases one usually looks for familiar landmarks or tries to get help. With enough verification like say arriving at the correct hotel or meeting your family, you are convinced that there was just an airport change. And then sometimes you look down and realize you are naked, oops a dream. Sorry, you can never be 100% sure.
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