Almost everything we do—from who we speak to and how we think, to the tiniest, most involuntary movements of our bodies—can be tracked and sold by today’s tech companies. Dreams may be the final frontier of privacy. But what if that, too, was taken from us? What if our subconscious could be surveilled to prevent crime before it even happened—an extreme version of predictive policing technologies already in use today?
Set twenty years in the future, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel follows Sara Hussein, an archivist, wife, and mother who ends up in a retention center for a crime she hasn’t yet committed—thanks to her DreamSaver, an implant that promises better sleep but also collects data about its host’s dreams.
In our conversation, Lalami reflected on the process of writing the book, the parallels between her characters’ challenges and our own, and the kind of future we need to shape to protect our privacy and autonomy.
Daleelah Saleh How did you come up with the premise of your novel?
Laila Lalami One morning in 2014, around the time I turned in copyedits for The Moor’s Account [Lalami’s third novel], I reached for my phone and saw a Google notification: “If you leave right now, you will make it to Yoga Works.” I was creeped out—I hadn’t put my yoga classes on my calendar. Google had just figured out I went to the same location every Tuesday and Thursday and had determined it was a yoga studio.
I remember thinking, this is a crazy granular level of data collection. They stopped sending those notifications, but I was so disturbed. I turned to my husband and, as a joke, I said, You know, pretty soon the only privacy we’re going to have left will be in our dreams. And then I started thinking, wow, that’s an interesting idea.
Saleh One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “Sara comes from a long line of difficult women.” Her mom, Faiza, is such a strong example of that. Her dad, however, is the opposite—he’s constantly anxious and insistent on compliance.
I’m curious how you think about that contrast, and about Sara coming from this lineage of “difficult” women. Why is it important that she, her mother, and the other women in the book continue to assert their agency, despite these multiple forms of surveillance you’ve outlined?
Lalami Well, we often think of power as flowing from the top down. And that’s true in an economic sense. But power is not static. When you think about it as dynamic, you start to realize that it can flow in all kinds of directions: downwards, sideways, back up.
Once you start to see it that way, you also start to notice how much power we have as individuals, and how often we relinquish it because it’s easier. You’re in a rush, a website asks to collect your data, and you just click “agree” without thinking. In that moment, you’ve ceded power you didn’t have to.
I wanted to show these women using their powers, even in the smallest ways. At the beginning of the book, when Sarah is getting her device checked, she refuses to bend her head. It was a small gesture, but it was a way to retain her dignity. The refusal to cede any amount of power is a form of resistance.
Saleh And on that note of people coming together, a major theme for me was collective action. There are multiple moments where Sara could choose to prioritize herself. She’s told again and again—by her husband, by her lawyer—to keep her head down and follow the rules so that she can be let out. But that pressure eventually reaches a breaking point. She realizes she owes something to the other women who have risked their lives for her, and she chooses to stand with them.
That raises a larger question at the heart of the novel: what do we owe each other?
Lalami Yeah, I mean, this goes back to the fact that we live in an extremely individualistic society. We are constantly told by the culture to look after ourselves and pursue our own self-interest.
In his book The Social Contract, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reflects on the clash between individual interests and the needs of the community. The social contract depends on us placing the interests of everybody above over our own individual interest. And the problem in the United States is that we are seeing a breakdown of the social contract. It’s all about me, me, me—I have to acquire as much money as possible. That system is not sustainable, and it’s deadly.
The novel allowed me to create a narrative order that is lacking in the outside world, which is so chaotic. Within the novel’s retention center—an absolute horror scenario—you can see these ideas in action. The only way for any of the women to regain their freedom is to put the community’s interests above their own. That’s really the central tension of the book, and what makes their choices so difficult.
Saleh There’s a line in the book that describes freedom as “a wresting of the self from the gaze of others,” including one’s own. Is that how you think about freedom?
Lalami That’s how I would define one type of freedom—freedom from the surveillance systems that these big tech companies have imposed upon us. We are living under a new era of data colonialism, where these big tech companies have decided that the data that your body emits belongs to them. They can mine it, trade it, sell it, use it to predict behavior, and do whatever they want with it.
The problem is that the system doesn’t really offer people consent or choice. Very few of us are lawyers. We don’t know what the data is going to be used for. It’s all hidden in this very vague language. And oftentimes we don’t understand what we’re even giving away. A lot of these systems are designed to be “opt out.” You’re essentially included before you even know it’s happening, and that’s by design. So I think that one definition I would give for freedom is this freedom to your own body, to the data that it produces.
Think about slavery—the most horrifying example of complete loss of freedom. At its core, it’s about who owns the body. Does the person own it, or does someone else? Freedom can’t exist without bodily integrity. In the technological era, that means ownership of all the data your body produces, the ability to control it, to decide whether it’s private or public. Right now, we’re moving in the opposite direction; most people would want to keep their data private, but we don’t get that choice. Big tech has been making massive leaps for decades, and lawmakers haven’t kept up.
Saleh It’s not profitable for these companies to have regulation. And so, why would they?
Lalami Yeah, especially now. I live in California. Just imagine running for Senate or governor here—if you make an enemy out of big tech, they have so much money, they can bury candidates. They’re very, very powerful.
Saleh There’s a sense of resistance in the world of the novel, even beyond the retention center. We see protesters outside the Dreamsaver Inc. facility, which is responsible for the devices that monitor dreams, and there’s even a fictional article noting that almost a third of the population doesn’t fully agree with the “Crime Prevention Act” (akin to the Patriot Act) that enables the government to access private records such as dreams to “prevent” crime.
We also hear about the “Twenty-Thirders,” a group of people who “log online only if needed, always from a secure connection, and for never longer than an hour per day” in order to minimize their digital footprint and avoid big-tech’s overreach.
It feels like, to be free of big tech, you must go to extremes—either become a real-life Twenty-Thirder, or resign yourself to the idea that your data will be taken and there’s nothing you can do. As we see increasing tech overreach in the real world, is there an in-between? Are there ways to assert agency over our data and protect our right to privacy without going to extremes?
Lalami I think that the number one thing we must do is not resign ourselves. I am very disturbed by the attitude, particularly among younger people, that says, “They already have my data, so what does it matter?” Just because they have some of it doesn’t mean you need to give them more. And by the way, big tech wants you to think that it’s too late and there’s nothing you can do.
You can choose not to have twenty social media accounts. You can pick one that is particularly valuable to you and delete all the others. You can limit your use to work-related things. You can set time limits. You can stop scrolling for two hours every night. It is crucial to recast the amount of time and labor that you spend on your phone and on these technological devices.
We’re in the early days of this. And to give up before the battle has even been waged seems silly to me. You don’t need to become a Twenty-Thirder, but you do need to use your voice for advocacy, to talk to your representatives, to seek community in vivo, to remind yourself of why we are social animals without the need to insert a corporation between you and me.
Like you can meet with someone face-to-face, put away your phone and just talk to them for two hours. You don’t need to be doing it over the phone. So I think, you know, I think both individually and in community, there are things that you can do. I don’t think that quitting the internet and giving up are the only choices.
Saleh I’m of the post 9/11 generation that is so used to being surveilled without consent. A great majority of us have just accepted it.
Lalami The way I think about it is—you don’t want to make it easier for them by completely giving up.
Saleh I’m curious about your use of language in the novel as a way to sanitize systems of power and control . You’ve spoken in other interviews about the importance of language—for example, how terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used as euphemisms for torture in Guantánamo.
Lalami The U.S. has really perfected the ability to pass off policies that are extremely frightening under the most innocuous names possible. I knew that if I was going to create a world where people were being imprisoned for crimes they have not yet committed, it had to be couched in language that was anodyne, so the average person could accept it without questioning what’s happening.
So instead of a detention center, it’s a retention center. Instead of guards, there are attendants. Because, don’t forget, these people haven’t committed a crime. They’re not in jail. They’re not in prison. They’re in a retention center. Developing the language of the world was probably one of the most fun parts of the process. What kind of law would enable all of this? A “crime prevention act.”
I remember visiting the Stasi Museum while I was working on the book and seeing remnants of the Berlin Wall. A guide asked us if we knew what the Wall was called in East Germany. We didn’t. It was called the Wall of Protection. Even as it confined people, it was framed as something protective. This is a strategy that is used a lot in authoritarian systems, and I thought it would make sense to use it in the novel.
Saleh What are other ways in which histories of surveillance, incarceration, and state control shaped your building of The Dream Hotel?
Lalami People assume pre-crime is a futuristic concept, but it has existed for centuries. Take the Wayward Minors Act (1820–1900), for example: it targeted youth considered “at risk” of becoming criminals. A sixteen-year-old girl out late drinking or causing a public nuisance might be sent to a reformatory for three years, exceeding the actual punishment for the crimes she might commit—like prostitution, which carried a sentence of only a few months in jail. Other historical examples informed the book as well: indefinite detention has been used in apartheid South Africa, in Israel against Palestinians, and, most obviously, at Guantánamo Bay. These precedents helped shape the world of pre-crime and retention centers in the novel. And the Patriot Act was a big inspiration for the Crime Prevention Act, obviously. The fact that it was bipartisan also felt important to include in the book.
I was also really interested in whether dreams have ever been used as evidence in trials. As it turns out, the answer is yes. Apparently, your dreams can be entered as evidence, so long as the dream was reported to a third person. If you say, Oh, I dreamt that I was stabbing so-and-so, and then that person turns up dead and you’ve already described your dream to somebody else, then that becomes evidence. If the police suspect that you are guilty of this crime, they can use your dreams to argue that you were essentially fantasizing about committing it, which can speak to your motive. So that was a surprise, and an inspiration.
Dreams are so fluid. You know, they have a lot in common with fiction, actually. Dreams are often how we imagine the future, and we can also find examples where dreams have been premonitions. Culturally, dreams carry a lot of significance. If you look at the Bible and the Qur’an, you see there are dreams that have been foundational. And politically speaking, you have Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” right?
The question is, will we ever reach a level where technology is able to access the content of our dreams? I think we’re a few years away still.
Saleh Can you speak to the destabilization of the self under surveillance?
Lalami I knew someone a few years ago who was part of a Muslim community in Chicago that was under surveillance by the FBI. She told me that there came a moment where somebody who knew said, Oh, so-and-so is watching me but wasn’t sure if it was true or if they had dreamt it. When you’re constantly under surveillance, you start to doubt yourself. You start to dissociate from yourself. Like Sara in the novel, who over an extended period of time in retention, started to wonder whether she did have a dream indicative of secret criminal intentions.
Saleh What is lost when we distill things such as dreams and thoughts into supposedly objective data points?
Lalami If you look at the history of science, it’s filled with examples of people who believed they could arrive at an objective measure of human worth or intelligence. You had scientists measuring skulls and claiming it told them who was intelligent and who wasn’t. So the idea that we now have this massive data collection system and that it won’t be used to make similarly flawed, supposedly “objective” judgments about people—I don’t believe that. It’s already happening, and it will continue. People will be labeled and categorized based on what the data says about them, as if that were definitive truth.
I think what we’re seeing is a kind of tyranny of data—the belief, largely pushed by big tech, that data about you is an accurate reflection of who you are. But those are two very different things. You can produce all kinds of data, consciously and unconsciously, and that still doesn’t capture your full complexity as a human being—your ability to think, to create, to understand.
What these systems do is confuse data with truth. And in that sense, they echo older forms of power: like colonial regimes that built bodies of knowledge about entire regions and treated that as totalizing truth. Edward Said wrote about this in Orientalism. It’s the same dynamic, people creating knowledge and using it as a means of exerting power.
Saleh There’s a strong relationship in the book between labor and knowledge—how labor is used, exploited, and shapes systems of power. In the book, once retainees withhold their labor, the system starts to fall apart. How is the question of labor essential to how we can think about the techno capital state?
Lalami You really have to be careful about the claims Big Tech makes. Take self-driving cars, for example. They’re not actually self-driving. And the definition of self-driving keeps changing; there are all kinds of shenanigans at the language level. Companies like Waymo are relying on human labor to keep the cars running safely. When a car malfunctions—say it sees an orange cone and stops—laborers are the ones deciding whether it should move forward.
What this has done is remove drivers from the equation and pool all the responsibility onto these remote workers, often in places like the Philippines. Labor is absolutely at the center of this sea change. You know, workers are nervous. They do not want to be replaced. I can tell you that people in academia are nervous.
The question of labor is central to the question of the future. It’s really about the survival of the worker, the ability of the worker to have power over his or her labor, to sell it or dispose of it, to withhold it. It’s the same question of bodily autonomy.
Saleh For readers seeing the novel as a mirror to the issues we’re grappling with now—tech, AI, surveillance—what do you hope they take away? And especially for Muslim readers who may see themselves in Sara, what do you hope it offers them?
Lalami I hope that the act of reading encourages thinking. I mean, this is not a book that is meant to comfort or entertain people. It’s meant to get them to think about the world that we’re living in, our relationship with technology, the kind of future we are building, the kind of connections we have to make if we want to survive. You know, the last word of the book is “connect.” And I do not believe that survival is possible in isolation.
