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 AI and algorithmic bias. Like 1984, Sara exists in a world where AI analyzes her very facial expressions as a sign of guilt or danger to the world around her; like The Minority Report, Sara has been arrested for a crime she has not committed.

Although these comparative titles portray strictly authoritarian or totalitarian governments, The Dream Hotel’s version of America is more subtly insidious. The America in The Dream Hotel clings to ideas of freedom and protection of rights while stripping them silently away from people deemed unworthy. In this way, government in The Dream Hotel is a hybrid government—a government in between democracy and authoritarianism—mirroring the increasingly blurred lines in many contemporary dystopian narratives, where surveillance, privatization, and consumerism often replace overt totalitarian rule. Many dystopian novels focus on the contrast between governments and their citizens rather than corporations versus humanity. The Dream Hotel explores a dystopia shaped by the merging of corporate and state power. While the Risk Assessment Administration is a government agency, it relies heavily on private companies such as Safe-X and Dreamsaver to carry out surveillance, punishment, and behavioral regulation. This entanglement blurs the line between public interest and profit, making it difficult to tell whether citizens are being protected or exploited. The novel critiques how capitalism, surveillance technology, and risk scoring are used to justify human rights violations in the name of safety, often with the public’s reluctant cooperation.