Buckle up for data-driven surveillance run amok.
In Laila Lalami’s unnerving speculative novel “The Dream Hotel,” archivist and mother Sara Hussein faces the unthinkable – detention for having occasionally violent dreams. It’s a “precrime” in this not-too-distant world: a perceived inclination to break a law that raises digital flags and alerts authorities. To take back her freedom, Sara builds alliances and hunts for ways to outsmart the devices monitoring her dreams. It all makes for a terrific page-turner with some very timely messages about privacy and agency.
In a recent video chat, Ms. Lalami reflected on the novel’s origins, world-building, and mission. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why We Wrote This
Novelists can often put their finger on anxieties that are swirling in society. By projecting into the future, they expose and shed light on the present.
You open the book with the line “You don’t have to do anything: you’ve already agreed to the terms of service.” Why start there?
When I was conceiving of the world of the novel, I thought that it might not be so different from our present. Today, we are very often trading our privacy for the sake of convenience and for the sake of making connections with other human beings.
People continue to use Facebook because their mom is on it or their book group is on it. I use WhatsApp. So there’s a certain level of dependence. And, of course, I’m signing off on all this without reading the terms of service.
I thought, if I take that to its limit, I can imagine a world with generalized precrime coming into being through these agreements that we sign without realizing how much we’re signing away.
Why did you choose dreams as Sara’s Achilles’ heel?
The surveillance is happening in the book through dreams. [After getting an intrusive Google notification] one morning, I turned to my husband and said, “Pretty soon the only privacy we’re going to have is in our dreams.” And I started thinking, “What if we reach that level of data collection and it penetrates our subconscious?”
I sat with this idea for 10 years. Dreams are a place where we can do anything and not be judged. They’re a place where you’re just free. I thought it would be really interesting to bring this free-flowing world of dreams up against the hard numerical world of algorithms. What would be one of the uses of this technology? And I immediately thought of crime and punishment.
Freedom is an obvious theme of the book. What did you want to underscore?
None of us are born wishing for servitude. We’re born wishing for freedom, and we have within us this instinct for what is just and what is free. And when we are confronted with these systems that are unjust and unfree, we know within us that this is not right. The novel offers one way in which the characters are finding their own solution to that problem.
Sara realizes at the retention center that “The system is never satisfied with the data it already has.” Would you say more about that?
In some ways, this book is a systems novel. It’s asking us to think through how technology works on every level of our lives. And one of the things that has become clear to me is that [today’s] tech oligarchs aren’t going to stop on their own. They have essentially laid claim to our private data.
They’re literally laying claim in the same way I wrote about in a previous novel, “The Moor’s Account,” which is based on historical fact. The conquistadors would land in New Spain, as they called it, and lay claim to it and read a document informing natives that they were henceforth subjects of His Holy Imperial Majesty and if they put up any resistance they would be killed or enslaved.
You scatter made-up apps and tech tools throughout the novel: social media site Printastic, pregnancy tracker Nimble, and the implanted Dreamsaver that tracks Sara’s dreams. Was it fun to come up with those?
I’ve seen the rise of the internet and remember things like Yahoo. What kind of a name is Yahoo? All of these companies try to come up with names that are original. Part of the great fun of world-building is coming up with the right products and services that populate this world and figuring out names for them, so I really did have a great deal of fun with that.
Sara is relatable: a multitasking working mom. What drew you to her?
I wanted someone whose relationship to technology mirrored my own. Someone who, yes, is aware that there are privacy violations and data breaches, but still has an iPhone.
What might motivate her to go to the next level and get a device that helps her sleep? I remembered how much sleep I craved after I had my child. Then, how do I raise the stakes even further? I know: What if she has twins? So it grew from there.
Did writing the novel change how you make privacy choices?
I’m on my personal journey with that. I deleted my Facebook account in 2018 (although I have an author page someone else maintains). I am still on Instagram. I still have an iPhone.
I’m very careful with what I post. But I still use it. Technology is a tool, and we need to be able to use it and adjust it to our needs.
