This is an area where I was taught through immersion. The Holy Spirit just threw me into the ‘end of the pool’ as a teenager. For awhile I thought I might need mental counseling because of the ‘open vision’ experience I had, plus all of the mental visions / pictures I was receiving. I kept it to myself as I had no instruction from the Spirit to seek out counseling. Although the Spirit did provide me several very short encounters with much older elder saints who verified that they themselves had the same types of experiences. My religious background and denomination didn’t mention ANYTHING like what was what going on with me at the time.
Yet when I read the Bible there were ALL sorts of examples of visions and dreams and mental pictures in both the Old and New Testaments. God does use our brain’s capacity for visual stimuli to help us see and understand certain things. Dreams were also a big part of my experiences as a teenager and later in my life. I could always tell when I had a spiritual dream as it was ‘burned’ into my brain. I could remember it and He would begin to teach me through it. There were several dreams He used to teach me over many years. All the spiritual and Biblical principles were there. So I don’t negate dreams. But for me it has been pretty easy to discern when my brain was manifesting / creating dreams and what a dream was like from an ‘outside’ source. The recurring nightmares I had as a child stopped when I took spiritual authority over them and commanded them to stop in “the name of Jesus”. Also a spiritual dream from the heavenly side was highly in color and vibrant, and coherent for me, I could remember lots of details about them.
Much later in life I realized God uses our imagination as well to teach us. In fact I’ve come to see it as almost ‘Holy’ when under His direction. Obviously there are huge gaps of my knowledge of the spiritual realms and dimensions, I only know small parts and have just the images He has shown me. But what I have ‘seen’ has been a source for my historical fiction writing when describing certain spiritual aspects and of heaven. Those images are forever with me. Will heaven be like what I saw? I really don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me to recognize certain things there when I finally get there. I imagine the scope of heaven is massively larger than my little visual experiences. I have read a lot of NDE (near death experiences) testimonies. And many describe a lot of things that were similar to what I have experienced / ‘seen’.
I guess I say all of this to encourage you not to be afraid of God showing you something, or having a vision, or a spiritual dream. All of those are very scriptural experiences. Now as to the interpretation of them? There is only one correct Source I know … the Holy Spirit, who can tell you what they mean. This is why I also encourage people to learn how to ‘hear’ and interact with the Holy Spirit regularly. Relationships take time to get to know one another. The Lord has used me quite a bit to help people not feel weird in sharing some very bizarre spiritual experiences they have had. Most were very afraid of telling anyone about them ESPECIALLY anyone at their current church. I guess that’s why I encourage the gift of the prophet in the Body. If someone is gifted with the prophetic and are moving and learning in that track then they are already experiencing these kinds of ‘different’ encounters and can help others of how to seek the Holy Spirit out and to ask Him questions.