Since magical realism dwells on concepts of reality, one of its characteristics is that its authors explore what people can perceive and how they perceive it. The visual is therefore important to the genre, with authors dabbling in devices such as montages and word play to achieve visual effects within texts. Some of the other ways in which magical realism has approached the subject of perception include through the theme of psychoanalysis, which explores ideas of the unconscious, and the idea of modern visual technologies, among them photography, as representing new forms of perception.
Many works of magical realism specialize in transmuting the mundane into new states, specifically into forms that are surprising and unreal, as the critic Angel Flores suggests. This unreality isn't outside of the everyday world, but a seamless part of it. The common and everyday therefore become awe-inspiring, and the reader is left to marvel at the surprises that can be found in things previously thought to be quite ordinary. As writer Bruce Holland Rogers noted, the effect is to remind the reader that nature and our world are indeed surprising. For example, in the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez, the discovery of ice in a village is described as miraculous, though ice isn't typically thought of as so by most people.
In a similar fashion, some works of magical realism work in the opposite way, transforming the strange or amazing into something more mundane and ordinary. An author writing in the magical realism genre might work to reduce even the most coincidental or astounding occurrence to mediocrity by rooting it in the everyday, or by examining it in such close detail that it begins to seem ordinary.
A characteristic that separates magical realist fiction from genres such as science fiction is that magical realism makes no attempt to imagine a future or alternate world; it doesn't seek to speculate about the possibilities of living as science fiction does, for example. Instead, as Rogers points out, magical realism is more concerned with people of our world who simply have a different experience of reality compared to the one that most people might determine to be usual. The world for these characters is real, but simply against the status quo.