When students in California told me of reliving experiences from earlier times, I dismissed their stories as just more of the California scene. But when I heard similar accounts from Ann Arbor & New York, I began to seek a rational explanation, not for the experiences claimed, but for claims of such experiences.

I believe television is the answer. Anyone who watches Humphrey

Bogart on the late show go through customs in Hong Kong, may, years later, if he himself actually goes through customs in Hong Kong, feel he is reliving the past.

This feeling will be all the more mysterious if he doesn't recall the film, and who, in fact, consciously recalls more than a fraction of what he sees on TV?

We may not even recall, when seeing a film for the second time, having seen it before. Instead, we are left with the curious sensation of knowing the outcome but not knowing how we know it.

Yet, no matter how vaguely recalled, parts of these experiences are stored in memory. Like dreams, they sometimes resurface.

Television extends the dreamworld. Its content is generally the stuff of dreams & its format is pure dream.

Consider an experiment run by Dr. Herbert Krugman, psychologist at General Electric. A subject, with tiny electrodes fixed to the back of her head, was comfortably seated before a simulated TV set. She was told to relax & look at a magazine until commercials came on the screen.

Three commercials were shown, each three times. One was quiet, with pleasant outdoor scenes. The second was also very gentle. But the third was explosive, showing fastballs hurled at an unbreakable sheet of plastic.

Fast brain waves, produced in response to the magazine, indicated relaxed attention, interest & mental activity. Slow brain waves, produced in response to the TV commercials, indicated a relaxed condition with elements of both drowsiness & alertness. This characteristic mode of response to TV developed within 30 seconds, didn't change significantly between soothing & exciting commercials, and dropped only slightly with repetition of the commercials.

Reading is hard work. It makes enormous demands upon the neurological system. It employs one sense only, and that sense in a most peculiar way.

Some years ago, it was alleged - first in a medical volume, later in a psychiatric journal - that Africans needed more sleep when taught to read, and that clothes aided them in reading by conserving body heat & energy. Convincing evidence wasn't offered then & hasn't been offered since, but I've gradually come to wonder, on the basis of scattered observations, if that theory may not have considerable merit. I'm not prepared to dismiss out of hand the observation that it's easier for a naked man to watch TV than it is for him to read.

When food was rationed in France during World War II, the largest portions went to those engaged in arduous physical labor & those whose work involved reading & writing.

We think of exhaustion in terms of toil & sweat, but reading, by employing one sense only sight - and employing it in a highly restricted way, destroys the harmonic orchestration of all the senses. Reading can be more exhausting than physical labor.

Moreover, reading involves language and all languages are highly abstract, their grammars closer to mathematics than to daily sensory experience. And words neither sound nor look like the things they represent. That association must be learned.

The word "house" doesn't look like a house, but a picture of a house often does. Anthropologists like to point out that people who are unfamiliar with photographs must first be taught how to "read" them. This is true, but it's also true that they learn very quickly. There's an enormous difference between reading the word "house" and seeing a picture of a house. Reading makes different demands on the brain.

Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come at us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't just wash over us & then "go out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious.

Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification.

Asked where he has been, a child who has been running, shouting, slipping in the mud, smelling autumn leaves, eating hot dogs, replies, "Out." Asked what he has been doing, he says, "Nothing." Finally the parent extracts an acceptable answer: "Playing baseball. " But that reply is adequate only to the parent. The child knows how inadequate words are for any total sensory experience.

Any picture is a mass of information in a flash. A written caption or narration may classify bits of this information, telling us what to look at & how to respond to it. But most information on TV is unclassified - like a telephone directory that hasn't been alphabetized.

This makes it splendidly attractive to artists & others who seek to create their own worlds. But for most people it means a-never-to-end-too-much-of-things .

Teachers, of course, teach classified information. This is why they love lectures & texts. Any language is itself a great classifier. It makes the complex coherent, the ambiguous explicit. Words show us the difference between "trees" & "bushes, " a distinction less clear in life than in language (unless a gardener, with clippers, makes nature resemble language).

Information packaged in words is easier to learn, recall, and have opinions about than information packaged in pictures, especially moving pictures.

How much more difficult to recall unclassified information! How impossible to have opinions about it!

We don't remember very early childhood experiences because they are not encoded in language or any other cultural code.

TV has little to do with communications in the old sense of transfer of knowledge from knower to nonknower. For one thing, there's nobody out there waiting to receive messages, no audience to be bombarded. There are only potential participants.

This is especially true in the modern classroom. Once students were empty buckets waiting to be filled. Now these buckets are overflowing with information acquired outside the classroom. In a world of media crop-dusting, the classroom has become a fallout shelter. It's now a place of detention, not attention.

Unlike print, TV doesn't transport bits of classified information. Instead it transports the viewer. It takes his spirit on a trip, an instant trip. On live shows, it takes his spirit to real events in progress.

But here a contradiction occurs: though TV may make the viewer's spirit an actual witness to the spectacle of life, he cannot live with this. If he sees a criminal making ready to murder a sleeping woman & can't interfere, can't warn her, he suffers & is afflicted because his being is phantasmal.

So he participates solely as dreamer, in no way responsible for events that occur. All TV becomes dream.
This is the inner trip, the inward quest, the search for meaning beyond the world of daily appearances. It's the prophet "blinded so that sight is yielded for insight."

TV is actually a blind medium. We may think of it as visual, recording a world "out there." But it records a world within. Sight surrenders to insight, and dream replaces outer reality. TV, far from expanding consciousness, repudiates it in favor of the dream.

Jacques Lusseyran, blinded at the age of eight, tells how he wanted to use his eyes & looked in the direction where he was accustomed to see, but met only with despair. Then, suddenly, he realized he was looking the wrong way. Instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside, he looked from an inner place to one further within: "Immediately the substance of the universe grew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there."

Like Lusseyran, we've all been looking the wrong way and at first have seen nothing. We judge TV as if it were a modified form of print and, of course, find it wanting. What we overlook is the reality it reveals.

TV is the psychic leap of our time. It's a trip far more potent than LSD. It turns thoughts inward, revealing new, unsuspected realities. Those who prefer this inner reality live in a world apart. A confidential study (network financed) reveals that children west of the Rockies, from 11 to 12 on, are turning off TV, but their parents stick with it, becoming stoned in the process. Drugs, by comparison, are kids' stuff. It's really the silent majority over 30, that gets stoned nightly.

For TV addicts, reality seems messy, stale. They find daily life heartlessly indifferent to the needs of their imaginative life.

It is sometimes said that natives confuse dreams with reality. They don't, in fact, but the point is that dreams, for them, often constitute a focus for their emotions more substantial than reality itself.

TV is not wholly divorced from external reality. Those who visit this inner world sometimes acquire interesting information. They respond emotionally at the outset of a new situation, believing they know in advance what that situation holds. They say, "Oh, I've seen that before, " or simply, "Yes, I know." I once saw some children who, in real life, had never ridden horses before, mount & ride off as if they had done this all of their lives - which, of course, they had, on TV.

On July 31,1971, the New York Times reported a hurricane in southern New York: "John McDonough, who is 17 years old, was in his parents' home in Mahopac Point when the storm passed. 'The trees were blowing right down to the ground,' he said. 'We went down into the cellar. Man it was just like something on TV.' In describing the event, a number of youths used the television simile."

Not everyone finds it easy to reconcile real & unreal worlds. The psychic dislocations of interplanetary travel proved too demanding for some TV viewers. Alan Dundes, the folklorist, reports that TV coverage of the moon landing pushed certain neurotics into overt psychosis.