I don’t automatically believe nor automatically disbelieve what is called “private revelation.”
Hildegard of Bingen had them for over 70 years, and they weren’t “near-death” experiences either: they were intense visions that came to her, on and off, through all 5 senses, from age 3 until her death at age 81.
Even she did not consider them automatically worthy of belief, and for a long time didn’t know if they were a delusion or a gift.
I admire her sane and balanced point of view. God is capable of giving us visions; on the other hand, the brain itself is inconceivably complex, and capable of engendering convincingly fantastic other worlds.
But I want to ask the doctrinaire atheists this question: why and how would unaided materialistic evolution -— you know, that mechanistic process totally defined by survival and reproductive fitness -— have given us such powerful, apparently otherworldly, perceptions, capacities, and drives?
I ask you.
A vibrant imagination is critical to inventiveness. Inventiveness aids survival, depending on the circumstances. If the early humans survived better because individuals were able to fashion better tools to help them defend themselves from harm (and thereby survive to reproduce), formation of societies (which again aids survival) increased the avenues available to express inventiveness (correlated with intelligence) - into fields like the arts where the “invented product” may not have a direct survival benefit, but stands well as a token for the intelligence that allowed it to be produced. This, goes back to the vibrant imagination, completing a virtuous cycle.
Trivia: The person who formulated the theory for the structure of the Benzene Ring, Friedrich Kekule, dreamt of a snake eating itself tail-first, which led him to the structure of the Benzene Ring. This was one of the biggest breakthroughs in chemistry and critical to the advancement of organic chemistry.