The Dream Hotel: Big Brother is watching your data and your dreams

It doesn't take too much extrapolation to get from our current reality to a dystopia.

The Dream Hotel
By Laila Lalami
Published by Pantheon, 2025
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It can be interesting to read books that take a more literary approach to the concepts usually explored in science fiction. Authors who are usually focused on the inner lives of characters, the intricacies of relationships, or realistic human drama may turn their viewpoints toward the future to provide an idea of where the world might be going and what it will be like to experience these changes. Of course, that’s not to say that science fiction authors don’t do the same thing, but it can sometimes be refreshing to see a slightly different take on these ideas.

The near-future dystopia is one of the most common themes of literary science fiction, which makes sense. For authors who want to say something about the state of the world, looking forward at where things might be heading can make for an effective approach. However, care must be taken when doing so, since so many of these visions consist of looking at how awful it would be if white people would be forced to experience the oppression that other races already deal with. The classic example of this is The Handmaid’s Tale, which provides a horrifying look at what it might be like to live under a religious regime that has implemented a system of sex slavery. As effective as Margaret Atwood’s vision of oppression is, it gains its power from subjecting white women to the horrors that women of other races have been experiencing for centuries, making it seem offensively narrow-minded.

With The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami doesn’t fall into that trap. She has come up with a scarily realistic vision of a future that seems very near, and she highlights the disparities that currently exist and will probably become even more pronounced as time goes on. But while pervasive racism and similar issues are a concern, she also focuses on the experience of women in general in American society, including the scrutiny that they face, the perceived need to demonstrate perfection, and the sense of guilt that comes from failing to measure up to impossible expectations.

The big science-fictional conceit that Lalami comes up with here is technology that is used to monitor people’s dreams. However, that’s only one element of the system of oppression that has been put in place in her near-future. She introduces the idea that the United States would pass a Minority Report-style law known as the Crime Prevention Act, creating a Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) that monitors people’s data, and those who have a “risk score” that is too high get detained and held under observation until the authorities can be sure that it is safe to release them back into the public.

The upsetting implications of this type of law should be obvious, although it’s not hard at all to imagine politicians and law enforcement officials who tout the amazing benefits of these laws and policies. If crime and violence go down, who cares if a bunch of people’s rights get trampled on, especially if most of them are minorities? (For some reason, that sort of thinking never seems to apply when it comes to gun ownership rights, but that’s just one example of the incoherence of political discourse in the United States.)

Lalami’s story follows Sara Hussein, a woman who gets detained while traveling through an airport and sent to a “retention center” where she is supposed to be kept under observation for 21 days. However, through a series of events that seem impossible to avoid (minor infractions like not maintaining the right hairstyle, a government shutdown that delays her hearing, and so on), her stay keeps getting extended, making her begin to wonder if she’ll ever get released.

The reasons Sara and the other women (who are always referred to as “retainees,” with the authorities emphasizing that they are not prisoners) get detained and disciplined seem frighteningly arbitrary, although there does seem to be a common thread in that most of them are minorities. Sara is of Moroccan descent, and her frustration about being questioned and searched at the airport, as usually happens to her and her family members, is part of the reason why she gets detained. While Lalami doesn’t call too much attention to it, many of the other women in the retention center are also minorities with names like Toya and Marcela, as well as others who come from lower income brackets or who have run afoul of the law in the past. Certain types of people are more likely to be viewed with suspicion, and they’re the ones who are going to bear the brunt of “law and order” policies.

The thing that makes all of this especially upsetting is the way the people in authority can claim that they’re acting with complete objectivity. The algorithms used to process data are scientific, taking a large number of factors into consideration and supposedly predicting who is likely to commit crimes with great accuracy. These are exactly the arguments that are currently being made when law enforcement uses “predictive policing” to decide where to patrol and who to arrest or when they use facial recognition systems or other types of technology to identify suspects. This technology is trained on data sets that are inherently biased (since police are more likely to arrest minorities, these are the people who are more likely to turn up in searches of law enforcement databases), and the programmers who create algorithms have their own prejudices. The idea that these programs are based solely on facts and science is ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop anyone from making these claims.

Regardless of who is the target of “risk assessment,” concerns about how people’s data is used are very real. We all know that information about our activities is being hoovered up by corporations who remix and resell it to whoever might benefit from it. It’s not at all farfetched to believe that the government could start reviewing social media activity, map data, purchase histories, medical records, family relationships, employment records, and who knows what else to identify and target those who are perceived to be threats. That sort of thing is already being done in some criminal cases or when the Trump administration is targeting certain people, such as those who have expressed support of Palestine.

That on its own would be bad enough, but Lalani imagines a technology known as the Dreamsaver, an implant that is meant to regulate sleep, helping people who suffer from insomnia or sleep disorders. While this technology has some definite benefits, fine print hidden in the terms of service allows the company to monitor people’s dreams, gathering more data that can be turned over to the authorities and used against them. While this sort of technology might or might not be possible in the future, it stands in here for the way we’ve made the most intimate details of our lives available to companies that do not have our best interests at heart.

I may be making it sound like this book is a screed against modern technology and a warning about the totalitarian future that it could bring. However, its focus is really on the experiences of the characters who are trapped in this impossible situation. Throughout her retention, Sara gets ground down to the point where she feels like a semblance of her former self. Her life becomes about being aware of the cameras and attendants that are watching her at all times, as well as all of the other forms of surveillance. She can’t get any rest, since any nightmares she has due to the stress of her situation could potentially be used against her. The slightest of mistakes could lead to a write-up and penalties that will extend the time before she can be released.

We also see how the retainees are pitted against each other, always suspicious of who might be watching or talking, forced to compete against each other rather than being able to work together for their own betterment. And what’s worse, it becomes clear that the private company that operates the retention center (which, by the way, is in an elementary school that had closed, a pointed comment on the changing priorities of the powers that be in the United States) has an incentive to keep people in retention for as long as possible, since it can make money by using them for labor. It’s a self-perpetuating system that could be described as a Kafkaesque nightmare if the motives of the people in charge weren’t all too obvious.

While much of the focus of the book is on the horrors and indignities of perpetual detention without a real reason, as well as the invisible systems that could be used to perpetuate these injustices, Lalami also makes all of this a commentary on the near-impossible expectations faced by women in modern society. In one passage early on in the book, Sara thinks about how she gets irritated by her husband’s impulsiveness while also envying his ability to make decisions quickly without “outlining every possible scenario and its likely consequences.” She notes that women don’t have that luxury, since they always have to be aware of how they are coming across to others. They have to try to avoid situations where they could be in danger while also considering whether their words or actions might provoke others (men) into attacking them, either verbally or through violence. She thinks, “To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others,” which could serve as a thesis statement for the book.

While this book isn’t necessarily a call to action to implement sweeping changes in our society and prevent it from becoming even more dystopian than it already is, it does serve as an eye-opener, an example of how the methods already being used by corporations and governments could become even more invasive and oppressive. Even if some protections are put in place to protect people’s privacy and give them more control of their data (which is increasingly unlikely under a government that seems willing to cede all of its power to billionaires and large corporations), the unjust scrutiny of the least powerful people in our society and the blame placed on them for their own unfortunate circumstances is something that needs to be recognized. While it would be nice if books like this would serve as a wake-up call to make necessary change, I fear that they’ll just be a documentation of a moment in time when people were still able to argue about the extent of the oppression that was on the horizon.