How I Knew I Was Asleep

This is just a short dream analysis of the dream I had in the last 30 minutes or so of my night. It started out at a daycare, which should have told me it was a dream to begin with, but I didn't notice. One of my old coworkers was there, standing in a corner. I found several masks, one from Naruto, one that looked like Jack Spicer's goggles from Xiaolin Showdown, and one that I forgot. I picked the Jack goggles, and took them to the mirror to put them on, and they turned into the Naruto ones, even though I was sure that I picked the Jack ones. That was when I started suspecting I was dreaming. I woke up to find Jimmy sleeping between the bed and night stand, where no one could lay in reality. There just isn't enough space. I asked him what he was doing there, but I don't remember his response. We got up and left the room. When I went into the hallway, there were four switches instead of one, two of which turned on a fan. While this didn't seem odd to me, I figured out I was still dreaming when I tried to turn on the light switches, and nothing happened. This used to be a common occurrence in my dreams when I was younger, except that I always got a really scared feeling when I would walk into my room and the light wouldn't turn on. I wasn't scared in this dream. I told myself that if it really was a dream, something would be off when we went out to the living room, so we started towards said living room. As we approached, we could see that the light was on and hear our son giggling from the living room. Jimmy went ahead, and I followed. As I peered in the living room from the kitchen, I could see one of our dogs. She is a dog, but in this dream, she was a cute little fluffy eared puppy. To make things weirder, she was laying on the floor and sliding around on it like a hockey puck. That pretty much assured me that I was dreaming. One more thing that I didn't notice was odd in the dream but do now is that, from the kitchen, I could see the blue ottoman with a green blanket over it as one of our dogs have claimed it as his throne. In reality, you can't see it from the kitchen unless you are looking over the baby gate. In my dream, it was just across the room from the baby gate, and our dog that was a puppy was laying in front of it.
So that is how I knew I was dreaming. If anyone else wants to know when they are dreaming, all I have to say is to look for the signs. Anything out of the ordinary can give it away. Broken lights, floating dogs, things magically transforming, purple cats, talking statues, whatever.