BOOKS: THE DREAM HOTEL, by Laila Lalami
Can we firewall our dreams before it's too late?
THE DREAM HOTEL, by Laila Lalami, 336 pp, Pantheon, March 4, 2025
[I’m not a book critic nor literary fiction essayist. I’m just a person who has read a lot and continues to do so, across genre, decades, and all other divisions into which people want to label books. I write about books because there are some people out there in the great digital world who want to know what an average reader with no agenda and no connections to the industry, and no need to get hits, thinks. So, do with that what you will.}
You know those nightmares in which you’re trying to crawl through a tunnel or squeeze through a crevice or door and the egress is impossibly narrow, you are stuck, the walls unyielding, and it’s terrifying? It isn’t just that you’re trapped, it’s also that — at least in my nightmares — it’s a space you’ve been able to navigate before, a door you have walked through without issue, and so not only are you afraid, you’re confused, disbelieving, full of “how did this happen” and “why is this happening?”
Welcome to THE DREAM HOTEL, Laila Lalami’s new novel which will leave its mark on your brain and heart like an acid etching.
Sara has landed at LAX, returning from London, and is targeted by an AI scanner for personal passport inspection, at which interview she’s told her risk score is too high and then escorted to Risk Assessment where she’s informed that according to algorithms collected from her dreams and “The software conducts a holistic review. It uses a lot of different sources.” she is likely to commit a crime, harming her husband, and so she is sent to a retention center where she will be under observation for twenty-one days.
Only the retention center, Madison, is run by a private corporation contracted by the government, and its rules and regulations concerning behavior of the “under observation” dreamers are so arbitrarily severe, and its attendants (guards) so drunk with power, that no one gets freed in twenty-one days. Systems in place for appeal are glitchy and/or deliberately impossible to navigate. And, too, systems from which detainees (prisoners, in fact, though that designation is denied) can purchase phone calls and computer time and food stuffs and other “luxuries” regularly do what computer systems do — screw people out of time and money, and offer no way to address those losses, furthermore, make doing so another offense for which time can be added to the dreamer’s sentence.
Not unlike for profit prisons that exist today, it benefits the corporation to retain prisoners and spend as little as possible per inmate in order to maximize earnings. The merger of fascist leaning government controls and regulations with capitalism-driven businesses used to enforce police state surveillance is a terrifying reality now, and about to become more so, and Laila Lalami creates that not-too-distant, all too possible hell-state with virtuosic literary-fiction finesse coupled with the energy and compelling pace of a thriller.
This novel is like the arguments you have with cable companies and government agencies writ large: Dealing with an algorithmic loop from which escape is nearly impossible, the helplessness you feel fighting a behemoth to which you are a number, an amount, an inconvenience, and which has made all of us into screaming, crazed, dangerously high blood-pressured harridans — and imagine the world in which that is the aim of the algorithm, to make you behave in ways for which it can punish you, punishment meaning further profit.
Liala Lalami inserts details — terms of service lingo, charts and reports, email transcripts — which ring frighteningly true. But aside from the precision of observation those details provide, the author is a master of rendering the human journey from believing you are safe in a society in which you thought you belonged, in which you believed you could trust and navigate, to the understanding that not only are you not safe, you are in danger, subject to the whims of unreliable systems which are invading and monitoring your every thought and action.
What Laila Lalami also does though — and this is what elevates the novel from really good to great — is to make us feel and experience all of this as if we were Sara. The exploration of her thoughts, her connections with people, and theirs with her, are heartbreaking, infuriating, disturbing.
It is personally disquieting to me that at points throughout the novel I wanted to say to Sara, “Well, stop that! Of course you’re going to get in trouble for that. What’s wrong with you!” And it is just that sort of blame-the-victim think for which I hated her husband and father and some of the other inmates. Even more upsetting for me is the fact that I was recently in court fighting a traffic ticket and had practiced being obeisant to the traffic cop and apologetic for my wrong, when I am absolutely, 100% certain that I was targeted and NOT wrong, at least in principle. But just as Sara is lectured and pilloried for not being obsequious enough, so too was I told by friends and lawyers and family to NOT be myself, to just say I was wrong and thus avoid the fine and point on my license.
It is brilliant of Laila Lalami to so insightfully limn the ways in which a corrupt system inculcates fear and group-think which can make one’s own family and community pressure one to surrender to compliance. And without giving anything away, it is encouraging to this reader that Sara — despite those pressures and the self-doubt that occurs when family and friends say “just behave” and “well what did you do to cause this?” and other victim-blaming behaviors — never gives up believing she is right and has been wronged by the system.
We already live in the world of THE DREAM HOTEL, in part, anyway. We have no privacy. There is nothing about us that is not heard and available to someone somewhere. We’re seeing this month what disinformation and control of speech and algorithms by corporations can do. As soon as I post this piece, as small a cog in the wheel of society as I am, it’s available for and subjected to AI mining. In the past two months I’ve been hacked and an attempt was made to blackmail me about my personal correspondence and photos and app usage.
In a world in which we have surrendered ourselves to a near-total lack of privacy in order that we have first-world techno-venience, THE DREAM HOTEL isn’t even a warning. It’s almost an “I told you so” waiting to happen.
It will keep you awake. Shake you. And maybe, just maybe, make you think about what you can do to firewall your soul and your dreams. It’s too late to protect any of the rest of your life.
I don’t know. I’m scared. And when a book can do that, and the prose is so high-level, that’s a five star read.
And here I am, going.1
FULL DISCLOSURE: I requested and was sent an advance copy of THE DREAM HOTEL with no strings attached. It was neither expected nor required that I write about it. I loved it all on my own. Even if it did give me nightmares.