In a world where everything can be tracked, recorded, and commodified, a person’s dreams represent the last frontier of privacy. In Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Dream Hotel, even dreams are monitored, evaluated, and used to calculate an individual’s risk of committing a crime.
Set in the near future, Lalami’s speculative novel feels stifling close to the present. The Risk Assessment Administration, formed in the interest of public safety after a particularly devastating mass shooting, observes data connected to an individual and algorithmically calculates a risk score. A person’s risk score works in a similar way to a credit score: below a certain threshold, and you can move through life normally. But if the score is above that threshold, many privileges remain out of reach, including, in some cases, your freedom. In The Dream Hotel, Sara Hussein finds herself detained at the Los Angeles airport after her score ekes above the threshold for reasons unknown to her: she’s told only that she has been flagged as someone at risk of committing a crime.
Sara behaves as any person expecting a basic standard of fairness would. She asks the officer why she is being detained and what could have possibly increased her risk. The officer responds, maddeningly, that the algorithm is “holistic” and considers all sorts of data. The software reviews her employment status, her loan history, her eviction record, her drug history, even her dreams, thanks to a neuroprosthetic device called a Dreamsaver that she uses to get a good night’s sleep as a new mother of twins. Sara grows increasingly indignant as she answers the questions as accurately as possible, to no avail. Based on her dreams, the officer finds her to be an immediate risk to her husband and refers her to Safe-X for a three-week monitoring period. Against her protests, Sara is transported to the Madison retention center, where, at the beginning of the book, we learn she has waited for the better part of a year.
Retention center, here, is a euphemism for prison. The retainees are constantly monitored through cameras, audio recording devices, and their Dreamsavers. “That they have committed no crime is beside the point,” Sara knows. She has done nothing wrong, but a “crime isn’t the same as a moral transgression.” The law is an ever-evolving set of standards—in her world, adultery and miscegenation used to be illegal and are now legal; burning flags and collecting rainwater used to be legal and are now illegal. The moving line threatens to leave people minding their business and moving through life on its wrong side.
The Dream Hotel’s concept of stopping crime before it happens threatens the basic tenet of innocence until proven guilty, but it is nothing new. Think Stop and Frisk laws, under which people thought to be suspicious for dubious reasons can be searched by police officers. Lalami’s book introduces nothing we don’t already know; it’s simply an amplified version. Nowhere is this more recognizable than with the private company partnerships that make the machine run.
Madison is operated by Safe-X, which operates “in loco magisteris,” meaning it can observe retainees and discipline them on behalf of the government. Safe-X contracts with an AI company for the retainees (i.e. prisoners) to sit in stuffy trailers, sifting through images to discern which are real and which are AI-generated so the company can improve its offerings. The retainees can only send and receive messages to the outside world using and paying for PostPal. OmniCloud holds all data related to any person.
Chock-full of private companies with an insatiable appetite for data, the book’s world is less of a warning about the potential implications of surveillance capitalism than it is an acknowledgement that this is already happening. Monitoring dreams is simply a continuation and intensification of the status quo. There can be no warning. The fire is already here.
Under constant surveillance at Madison, Sara is left with a shaky sense of selfhood, no longer knowing “how to separate her emotions from the expectations that others have about them.” She tries to stay calm, but rage simmers beneath the surface. Her retention period keeps getting extended for minor infractions, and her few, precious visits with her husband and children begin to dwindle.
The Dream Hotel wrestles with the tension between self-protection and community, and the costs of complicity. Sara must grapple with the limited options before her and decide whether to keep her head down and behave so her score lowers and she can return home, or to strengthen the friendships she’s developed with the other women retained at Madison and find a way to strike back.
When surveillance is so pervasive, striking back can feel insurmountable. It’s so easy to be complicit. We do it every day, wearily accepting cookies and using location services so we know where we’re driving and wearing watches that notify us of sleep apnea. We walk outside and allow our facial geometry to be collected and scanned, because what’s the alternative? We even make our own contributions, installing cameras everywhere in the name of safety: by our doorbells, above our babies’ cribs, on the corner of our garages, inside our living rooms to check on our dogs when we’re away at work.
We don’t want to be like this, but we do it. The alternatives are either scary or impossibly lonely—we want to be protected from crime; we don’t want to be hermits in the woods. Morally, we’re opposed to companies collecting our data to sell us stuff or using it to lock us away indefinitely in the name of keeping those around us safe.
But morality and legality are two separate things, and legally, by downloading the app and checking the box and clicking accept, we’ve consented. It’s right there in the first paragraph of The Dream Hotel: “you’ve already agreed to the terms of service.”
FICTION
The Dream Hotel
By Laila Lalami
Pantheon
Published March 4, 2025
