Perception in general is an odd thing.

In their essay 'All Narrators Are Unreliable', LB Lee make a case that comics are uniquely suited to artistically show characters' subjective experiences and points of view, and mix inner/outer reality more generally. They show all sorts of tricks, techniques and examples. And it's wonderful stories they cite.

(I've noticed — more grounded comics, however many spaceships and costumed heroes they have, sometimes suffer from a problem when they try emotional storytelling. They aren't nearly dense enough. Any however partially performed medium has the nuances of acting, while novels and the written word more generally can afford to ruminate on the world's or the characters' states with substantial inner descriptions. Comics can do that too, and it can be brilliant. But this is another way this medium can be denser — by utilising shape, colour, figurative visuals, and so on.)

This video essay by Geno7 talks about similar things, but (mostly) in audiovisual media. There's a funny focus skew in it in that 'subjective experiences' seem in the video to only mean 'daydreams and fantasies'. But it's wonderful, and it's a high point of the 'bring together and notice a genre' form.

The Left-Handed Hummingbird by Kate Orman has this really interesting bit (Interlude 2) where it, for a minute, shows almost directly the thoughts of the Doctor (an alien nominal protagonist of the series). It's disjointed and poetic and metaphorical and hits so beautifully at the moment you read it. And I've also used this trick before — for this character and others —
but it's how everyone thinks, isn't it? See almost any stream-of-consciousness novel. It's arguably more realistic and more representative of how people actually think than the usual kind of narration that's used elsewhere in the book. So, it's using familiar tropes and ways of conveying information to depict 'the familiar' itself, while the alien character gets the more human portrayal, in a sense. Fascinating.

There's an example of that same tendency in Planet of the Apemen, a documentary film about human prehistory. (No comment on its accuracy.) In the film, factual sections about its topic are intercut with a bare-bones fictional story set in that time period. The latter, as well as providing handy examples for the factual sections to dissect, are presumably meant to humanise those early humans to the audience and, in a way, show them 'how it really was back then'. But the way they go about that is by, well, aping tropes and visual styles of action and sports movies (sympathetic underdog protagonist that understands something about their world that no one else does, family tragedy kicking off the plot, etc.)

The documentary doesn't tell the fictional stories particularly skillfully, in my opinion, (though, to be fair, that might not be the point,) and so I'm left to wonder: how often does it happen that this trick is used, but works so seamlessly as to be unnoticeable?