a prophetic vision: revelation that God grants a prophet or seer to see, together with the message it delivers.
This word comes from a verb for seeing, but not seeing with the eyes. It describes the seeing God grants a prophet when he reveals something. So a vision here is not a daydream, an ambition, or a picture in the imagination. It is a real act of God making something known, and the prophet is the one who receives it.
The word looks at that revelation from three angles. Sometimes it is the experience itself, what the prophet is shown, as in the long symbolic scenes granted to Daniel. Sometimes it is revelation as a whole, present or absent, as when Israel is told that in a dark time no vision will be found. And sometimes it is the message a vision produces, the oracle a prophet proclaims or writes down, which is why whole prophetic books can open by calling themselves a vision.
Because the word names the channel and not its truthfulness, the Bible uses it for genuine revelation and, just as freely, for the false claims of lying prophets. A vision had to be tested. What made one trustworthy was not the word attached to it but whether it came true and agreed with what God had already said.