Unlike the reading process in which the reader is self-conscious and in control, watching television is a "kind of wakeful dreaming, except that it's a stranger's dream, from a faraway place, though it plays against the screen of your mind" (Mander, 201). This flow of dream images "bypasses thinking" and becomes an "influencing machine" to which people respond with zombie-like passivity. It simulates a kind of "sleep teaching," by implanting images in one's unconscious directly, without mediation by the conscious intellect (68).