What if Your Dreams Could Land You in Prison?

New York Times

04-03-2025

'The Dream Hotel,' the fifth novel by the acclaimed Moroccan American writer Laila Lalami, is set in a near-future reality only a notch or two on the dystopian dial away from our present. Its protagonist, Sara Hussein, is a museum archivist in her late 30s, living in Los Angeles with her husband, Elias, and their toddler twins. As a new mother suffering the rigors of insomnia, she finds relief in something called a Dreamsaver, an ingenious neuroprosthetic device that ensures high-quality sleep. Embedded in the device's terms of service, however, is a clause allowing the extraction and sale of its users' biometrical data, including the content of their dreams.
Sara becomes aware of this only when she is detained at LAX on her return from a conference in London. It's a couple of decades in the future, and the state keeps tabs on its citizens by way of a risk score — somewhere between China's social credit system and a credit rating — which calculates the likelihood of their committing a crime. Among the data sources for such assessments are dreams, supplied wholesale by the makers of the Dreamsaver. And Sara has been having dreams about poisoning her husband, which the government's Risk Assessment Administration (R.A.A.) reads, with insistent literal-mindedness, as a direct expression of a desire.
Lalami's dystopian premise here will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip K. Dick's novella 'The Minority Report' (or seen the 2002 Spielberg adaptation), set in a future where people are incarcerated for offenses they have yet to commit. 'The Dream Hotel' shares some of this dystopian DNA, but the forebear it nods most knowingly toward is Kafka. At one point, an incarcerated Sara recalls a trip to Prague, and a visit to the Castle; later she checks out 'The Metamorphosis' from the prison library.
Sara spends most of the novel attempting to negotiate the nightmarishly dense bureaucracy of the R.A.A., and of the so-called retention system in which she is being held. Though the initial period of retention is only 21 days, the staff at Madison, the facility where she is kept, find continual cause for extension. 'Retainees' perform unpaid labor on behalf of the private corporation that runs the facility. They are constantly breaking rules they didn't know existed; once you're in the system, it quickly becomes clear, your detention, which is entirely at the pleasure of an unseen and 'holistic' algorithm, is essentially indefinite. Safe-X, the company that runs the retention facilities, makes most of its money 'from the postponements it generated through its complicated disciplinary system.'
Despite the influence of Kafka and Dick, the novel's most obvious reference points are in the American present. One long and vivid sequence takes place against the backdrop of a Los Angeles consumed by wildfire. And anyone who has had the misfortune to find themselves snarled in the gears of Customs and Border Protection at a U.S. airport might read the extended account of Sara's initial detention with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Though not much is explicitly made of it, Sara shares with her creator a Moroccan background; the notion of people being punished for the perceived likelihood of committing a crime might seem less speculative to readers of Middle Eastern heritage. The book also clearly has its sights set on what Shoshana Zuboff terms 'surveillance capitalism,' as well as on the kind of algorithmic, predatory policing discussed in Jackie Wang's 'Carceral Capitalism.'
Lalami's social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction 'The Dream Hotel' often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara's situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it.
The third-person present-tense narration keeps us close to Sara's thoughts, but those thoughts too often reveal the presence of a heavy editorializing hand. And so we find her thinking, for instance, 'it's the parasitic logic of profit, which has wormed its way so deeply into the collective mind that to defy lucre is to mark oneself as a radical, or a criminal, or a lunatic.'
Her train of thought is, elsewhere, pressed into service as a vehicle for plot exposition: 'OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace, Sara thinks, its only serious competition the Chinese conglomerate that a handful of senators want to outlaw.' Still, the novel's central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people's inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.