Twenty-five years ago, Al Nadeau had a dream.

In it, Saints Peter and Paul Church had graduated to the status of basilica. Men, women and children came from all over the world to soak themselves in healing water discovered beneath the basement of the grand church. They came to be healed of blindness, paralysis and sickness of all varieties.

Nadeau awoke from the dream heavy with the weight of it.

“It was 2 in the morning,” Nadeau says. “I was all sweaty. I turned on the TV and there’s this preacher there. He’s pointing his finger at me and he said, ‘You have just had a dream and you need to follow through on it.'”

He was in his 50s then, and he knew the dream was more than just a random light and sound show inside his sleeping brain.

Most of us can relate. Remarkably little is known about the origin and nature of dreams. Powerful ones can leave us rattled as we wander the waking world. If you dreamed of a series of numbers that brought great wealth, you would play the lottery that very day. Dream of a horrific plane crash the night before you fly, most would cancel that flight and take a train.

Nadeau’s dream left him feeling like he had been given a mission. He told everybody about it, including officials at St. Peter’s. Wow, most said. That sure is interesting. Aren’t dreams just crazy things?

Not so crazy, really. The great church that scrapes the sky on Ash Street would later be designated a basilica. What’s more, dousing on at least three occasions — by Nadeau’s brother, a son and a complete stranger — detected water beneath and around the great building.

Two of three things foretold in a dream had materialized, but that was no big thing. Nadeau, a minister himself in Florida, always had faith in the message.

“To me,” he says, “it was divine intervention, not just a dream.”

With permission from the church, he collected a cup of water and asked a neighbor to anoint his deaf daughter as a sort of test. Perhaps the girl’s hearing would be restored and further proof of this blossoming miracle would be at hand.

It didn’t work.

Nadeau is wise enough to recognize that maybe he misplayed his role in the matter. His task was to spread word about the mysterious water beneath the basilica, not to raise it up and begin the process of healing the world.

“I feel I’m doing now what I’m supposed to be doing,” Nadeau says.

Simply relating what he has learned and letting the matter of miracles take its course, because Nadeau has no doubt that people will come to the basilica for its blessed water and they will be relieved of what ails them. More important, he believes, is that something else will be restored in humanity, something that has been dwindling over time.

“It’s going to bring back faith,” he says. “And that’s what we need right now.”

Nadeau knows the power of faith. The owner of Bedard’s Pharmacy for 30 years, he has seen the despairing set free from the binds of sickness upon the mere utterance of an encouraging word. Give the mind assurances, and the body rallies to repair itself.

“Even if it’s a placebo effect,” Nadeau says.”If they have enough faith, they may be healed.”

But faith is a troublesome thing for most of us. We want to have it and will even claim we do if the circumstances are right. But generally, we are scientifically minded. We believe the numbers on the NASDAQ more than hunches we get about our financial futures. Spiritual belief is a fine thing when you are sick, but maybe not so fine as penicillin and painkillers.

In an age when Google provides all the answers, faith is a quaint backup.

And so a quarter-century after awaking sweaty and trembling from a profound dream, Nadeau feels a renewed sense of desperation. He has to get the word out, nothing more. He is not staking claim to buried water beneath the basilica. Nor is he screaming at church officials to start digging now. But there is a sense that time is of the essence.

“This year, it came back,” Nadeau says. “There was no dream, but there was this feeling.”

And now, with his message delivered through the local newspaper, Nadeau can rest easy. He did his part and whatever is to be will depend on the next person on the miracle chain and the next person after that. “I feel I did what I was supposed to,” Nadeau says. “Now, I’m going to Florida.”

But he’ll be watching and listening.

From his wintertime roost in the sun, will Nadeau read about flocks of the desperate faithful trampling the grounds of the basilica in search of healing?

At Saints Peter and Paul, church officials neither embrace nor dismiss the significance of Nadeau’s claims. Monsignor Marc Caron feels that droves of people coming to pray on the basilica grounds would not be a terrible thing, but he would rather have them come inside to worship.

Nadeau would be fine with standard church prayer as well, but that is not the vision he was given in the dream. Saints Peter and Paul has become a basilica. Water has been detected beneath it. Nadeau, packing warm weather clothes into a suitcase, completely expects that the final step toward large-scale healing and a return to faith will soon be upon us.

“It’s going to happen,” he says.

And now, as they say in all the great movies, his work is done here.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer.