Swapnatirtha

At a resting place beside a canal at the edge of the town of Tokha lived a wretched leper together with his devoted wife. The two of them sustained their lives on the alms his wife brought home after begging through the villages.

One night that leper heard a divine voice in a dream: "Tomorrow, on the day of Mesh Sankranti, the water of this canal will possess extraordinary medicinal virtue. Whoever bathes in this water will be cured of every grave disease and bodily deformity."

The next morning his wife went off toward the village to beg for alms. At that very moment, some cowherds playing on the bank of the canal caught a frog that was writhing with a broken leg and threw it into the water of the canal. Wonder of wonders, that frog became perfectly healthy and leapt out.

Seeing this sight, the sick man remembered his dream and crawled into the water of the canal. The moment he plunged in, his entire leprosy vanished and he was transformed into a radiant, glorious, and handsome man.

When the wife returned with the alms and saw a handsome man in place of her leprous husband, at first she could not believe it. Later, when the other crippled, lame, and diseased people of the village were also made to bathe in that canal and she saw with her own eyes the proof that everyone's disease had been cured, she bowed down in reverence.

Because it had become a place of attainment through a divine sign received in a dream, that holy canal and pool came to be called 'Swapnatirtha'. It is a popular belief that bathing here every year on the day of Mesh Sankranti, the first of Baisakh, removes skin diseases and other bodily afflictions.