I’ve been able to lucid dream pretty much my whole life, although I’m not sure if you would call me experienced because I often don’t actually put the circumstances in place for me to lucid dream at 100%, if you could assign a level to the lucidity

anyways, with that context, I’ve never had the issue of being unsure if I was in a dream or not. but I’ve also never really needed a tell for it - I just know that I’m in a dream without needing to check.

tbh I don’t put much effort into controlling my dreams anymore, I generally just more guide them in a direction and then go with the flow. if I don’t like what’s happening, I kind of push that scene away and transition the scene into something else. It’s less about controlling exactly what I or the things around me are doing, and more about controlling the environment at a large scale rather than minute details. if that makes any sense. for example if I’m in some sort of adventurous dream where we’re exploring something and things are chasing us, and it gets too scary or something, I can just kind of make the decision to have whatever is chasing us back off and transition into the next scene. but it feels different than when I explicitly control what is happening