The Dream Hotel

Authoritarian governments, particularly those that punish innocent or dissenting citizens, are a common motif across dystopian literature. Most modern examples, such as The Hunger Games, include similar governments to explore themes of resistance. The Dream Hotel examines criminality itself, like the 2012 anime Psycho-Pass, which has a similar premise of citizens receiving a numeric score indicating their risk of committing a crime. While The Dream Hotel provides a unique take on the themes of dystopia, authoritarianism, and criminal justice, it owes much of its foundation to works like 1984 by George Orwell or The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick, two instrumental pieces of speculative fiction that explore the concept of crime beyond traditional definitions. In 1984, Orwell uses an authoritarian state to explore the idea of thoughtcrime, or the criminalization of thoughts and beliefs that go against the status quo of the government of Ingsoc. Similarly, The Minority Report invented the term precrime, with a plot centering around three government psychics, or precogs, who predict crimes and arrest perpetrators before they happen. The Dream Hotel builds on these ideas, weaving in discussions relevant to 2025 anxieties, including technological privacy, corporate and capitalistic concerns, and issues of