Its pretty clear to me at least. I can sometimes remember the moment I figured out I was dreaming. With some great ones being jumping through a closed window and off a skyscraper.
That seems terrifying. How do you separate that experience from the real world if you're say standing on the edge of a roof or bridge? How do you know _for sure_ you're dreaming and it's ok to jump?
I’ve had a few lucid dreams. The first couple of times were after making a habit of counting my fingers. In real life you always have the correct number. When dreaming it might be an incorrect or seemingly indeterminate amount of fingers.
So at that moment I would realize I was dreaming. But I don’t see why you’d just jump off of a bridge neither in a dream nor IRL. Personally what I chose to do was to attempt to fly by imagining jet motors on my legs. And it worked! And then I got excited and woke up :P
Anyway, when you become lucid it is because of things that are not like reality, so it will be obvious that it really is a dream. I see your concern but I could never imagine anyone thinking they were dreaming when they were not.
Another couple of times I’ve realized I was dreaming because the text in books or in papers were a jumbled floating mess rather than the static arrangement of letters that one would expect, and no information was conveyed as opposed to real life where most books and magazines are written to present some form of information in writing.
And one time I had a nightmare where my fingers and hands got holes in them and something was coming for me and I said “this is not possible”, and I realized then that I was dreaming and I took control and turned the nightmare into a pleasant dream by projecting the disease over on my assailant and escaping from it :)
Not the parent, but I have had similar experiences. What I do is check my wristwatch twice in a row. If the readings are radically different, or other weird stuff happens (no hands, more hands than usual, hands moving really fast, etc.) then I'm pretty sure it's a dream. And viceversa (apparently, my mind is not capable of generating a coherent watch in a dream, so if the watch behaves normally I know it's real life).
I'm also not able to generate a complex text in a dream, so trying to read a book can also work, and I suppose there are many similar possible tests based on the limitations of your dreaming mind. But the advantage of the wristwatch is that I always wear it in real life, so I know I will also be wearing it in dreams, so I can always do that test, while a book may not be available in a dream.
If you want to kill me, give me a wristwatch that does weird stuff and I might jump from a skyscraper trying to fly in real life at some point :)
My go-to reality check is to hold my nose and see if I can breathe through my fingers or not. If I'm lucid, then I feel the air going past them. I guess my subconscious doesn't bother trying to make everything completely realistic.