Degrees of Reality in Imagination

"Jesus said to his disciples: 'I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others the Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.'" - Luke 12:8-9

I have a confession to make, of something that I'm still only just starting to make sense of. When I try to picture the verses above, I think I'm using my mind and imagination in the same way as I do when I'm imagining something that I don't think is historical fact. It's a different process to picture something I am completely confident has happened at some place and time. 

Intellectually I do believe that Jesus' words here are absolutely true. But it's obvious to me that I have some work to do to more deeply internalize the reality of the things. How about you? When you picture the stories of Heaven, or the miracles described in the Bible, do you use your imagination to create pictures that some part of you knows aren't historically true? Or are these and other scriptural pictures in your mind off the same quality and style as anything else you'd imagine in "the real world"?