The chapter opens with a soliloquy by the doctor, who tells his patient that he has a dream. The doctor tells him that he should take care of his baldness first, otherwise he'll look like a bald man when he enters the "flowering stage" . He tells the patient that the disease has been going on for decades, and that the number of infected people has reached 900 million, or about 11 percent of the population of the world. He says that he's going to make a "screening program" to find out which patients have been infected and which have disappeared. He'll then "eliminate the special registrations" and "undefined factors" , so that all the infected patients will be weeded out. After that, he says, "we just need to do a little bit of research" to figure out what's wrong with the country's archives department. They've been unable to find any of the patients who have been affected by the botanic disease, and they've also found out that some of the clients who were infected with the disease have gone away, and some of them have gone to prison. He asks the patient if this is going to be a serious problem, and the patient says that it isn't, but that they'll have to spend some time in prison.