River Dream

This was my dream.  Probably because all of the waking time I have spent thinking about Lehi’s Dream.

In the midst of dry and forbidding wilderness that no one had ever crossed nor indeed knew if there was anything beyond it, there was a great fountain of water that gave life to a village that was all the people in the world. This was no ordinary fountain. Its water was so sweet and pure that it made the land it watered greener and lusher than ordinary water, and the people who drank it happier and healthier than ordinary water would.

But the water had one peculiarity. It made the people who drank it want to follow the fountain’s river down to the end. For the fountain, naturally, gave rise to a great river that wound its way through the dry lands to some mysterious end lost in the blue haze and shimmer of the horizon.

But there was a problem. The wonderful water of the fountain soon became dirty and brackish in the river, and as the people knew from short jaunts along side it, the further the river went the worse the water seemed to become.

One evening those gathered near the fountain heard the voice of the waters commanding them to go.

In obedience with the voice they went, trusting to Providence to provide fresh sources of water.

Others heard the voice or responded to the inward desire to go, but they thought walking through the dry lands was madness. The river was a superior form of transportation and in an emergency would provide a ready source of water, even if foul. As a precaution they packed barrels of fountain water on the barges and rafts they made from the timbered land of the fountain.

The river was very long and as they went the rafters were more and more forced to drink river water, mixing it with barrel water to make it more drinkable. The water was bitter and made them ill and cankered their bodies.

Meanwhile, those who trekked along the bank kept coming to small springs and little seeps and tributary trickles and inflowing creeks from pure sources, just when they were about to run out. The barge people as a matter of principle refused to land and use these pure sources of water. Sometimes, indeed, it would have been almost impossible to do so given the conditions of the bank or the inconspicuousness of the seep. But while strongly asserting the palatability of river water mixed with the water of the original fountain, it seemed that they often dipped into the river near one of these small tributaries and were refreshed enough to go on.

Some of these providential side sources of water had small stands of trees by them. From time to time, groups of the bank travelers would grow weary, or perhaps particularly enchanted with a source, and build their own rafts and their own barrels and launch out onto the river, holding themselves aloof from the others.

In my dream I knew that when the bank travelers arrived at the sea with their small supplies of water in skins, supplemented by whatever tiny quantities of pure water were left in the barrels of the river travelers, the pure water would refresh the entire ocean.

But in my dream, when they actually arrived, the ocean was already pure and sweet and everyone who bathed in it was made pure for ever. All cankers were cured, if they had them. But somehow it was still necessary to this result that the travelers had come on the bank bringing pure water, trusting in providence, and that some drops and drams of the original fountain had been preserved in a barrel here and there.