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man is what he dreams.”
    “Sounds like rubbish,” said the other voice. “But go on.”
    “When we sleep,” said the tortured soul, “it’s only our bodies that sleep. Our brains don’t sleep. Our brains go on thinking. If we have problems, our brains go on thinking about them, trying to sort them out, trying to solve them. But the solutions our brains come up with are in the form of dreams that our waking minds cannot understand. People have tried to interpret dreams, but they can’t, dreams are too subtle for that. But the way we behave and the solutions we eventually arrive at are guided by our dreams, even though we’re not aware of it.
    “I suddenly understood all this, you see. Probably because it was ultimately the solution to the problem I had. The problem with artificial intelligence. The answer was right there. In our heads, you see. The brain is the ultimate computer, you just have to know how to use it properly.”
    “Which is why you came up with Red Head?”
    “To enhance the intellect. To speed up the thinking processes. To create the human computer. Why bother to build machines, if the answers to the problems you would set them to solve were all inside your head anyway? Just needing a little chemical help to bring them out. But
I
didn’t come up with Red Head.”
    “I don’t understand,” said the other voice. “Explain yourself.”
    “I was lying there amongst the flowers,” said the tortured soul. “And it all became clear, like I say. And I realized that if such a drug could be formulated, it could change everything, solve all human problems. A group of human computers dedicating themselves to the good of humanity. Just think what might be achieved. I saw the big picture. The overview. But then I thought, how could I ever formulate this drug? It might take years and years. The rest of my life. What I really needed was a drug to speed up my own thinking processes, in order that I could create a drug that could speed up thinking processes. Bit of a Catch 22 situation there. But the crooked man showed me how to read the flowers and that’s how I came by the formula.”
    “Crooked man?” asked the other voice. “Who is the crooked man?”
    “He found me lying there on the floral clock. He helped me up and he showed me how to read the flowers. He told me that the flowers would help me, if I helped them. All they wanted was to sleep. It seemed a pretty fair deal to me.”
    “You’ll have to explain this,” said the other voice.
    “The crooked man helped me up. He said he’d been listening to what I’d been saying. I thought I’d only been thinking but apparently I’d been talking out loud. Or according to him I had. He said the answer was staring me right in the face, all I had to do was look at the flowers. Well, I looked at the flowers, but all I could see was the flowers. Lots of different coloured flowers in the shape of a floral clock. But he said, look at the colours. Think of the rainbow. Well, I remembered the poem we’d been taught at school, about how you remember the order of the colours in the rainbow. It’s a poem about fairies. It goes,
Some came in violet, some in indigo, In blue, green, yellow, orange, red, They made a pretty row
.”
    “I remember that,” said the other voice.
    “Yeah, well I remembered it and looked at the flowers. First the violet ones, then the indigo ones and so on. And they spelled out letters. Letters and numbers. They spelled out a chemical formula. The chemical formula for Red Head.”
    “With the corner up,” said the other voice.
    “It’s true. Well, the formula is true at least. The drug works. I wish to God now that it didn’t. But it does. When I’d written the formula down, I thanked the flowers and then I smashed the floodlights so that they could sleep and dream and then I walked all the way home and went to bed.”
    “Incredible,” said the other voice. “Insane.”
    “Oh yes,” the tortured soul agreed.