The Dream Hotel

“When she was a child, her father made the family go to the airport three hours early every time they went on vacation, in order to allow enough time for the extra searches. He liked to plan for every eventuality, a habit that owed less to his training as a physicist than to the immigrant’s chronic fear of anyone in a government uniform.”

This memory is structured like a miniature narrative arc, ending in a haunting image of a child internalizing racialized fear. Sara’s father is justified in his trauma around airports, and Sara does not escape the events of this novel unscathed; the end of the novel implies that, like her father, Sara will spend the rest of her life struggling against the bias of an uncaring, mechanical government, afraid of the consequences of resistance but more afraid of what not resisting will turn her into. Sara, despite her fear of her father’s detachment, becomes her father by the novel’s end—yet it is not either of their faults. The phrase “chronic fear” emphasizes the generational inheritance of trauma, rooted not only in individual psychology but in systemic racism.

“The next set of clips shows a man driving along a winding road in different vehicles. A blue motorcycle. A vintage Volkswagen. A zippy sports car. NovusFilm customers will be able to choose from an array of options when they watch the action-adventure movie that the studio releases each season.”

As is typical of the dystopian genre, technology is introduced that does not particularly make sense, The answer to why someone would want a variety of cars does not matter; the thematic point is that AI has progressed to the point that people use it to get exactly what they want, regardless of the meaning or artistic integrity. Sara’s experience of “film” is a grim reminder of what art without purpose beyond financial gain could become and is becoming.

“But Elias didn’t want to wait. Female fertility starts declining by age thirty, he would say, we have to start trying because it could take us a while. The back-and-forth lasted for six years, during which the subject became increasingly touchy, as likely to end in a fight as in extended periods of wounded silence. When Sara forgot to pack her birth control for a weekend in New Mexico, she wondered if it was not an unconscious form of abdication; she was tired of the protracted disagreements.”

The ironic understatement in “the subject became increasingly touchy” masks years of emotional coercion. Sara’s lack of consent over her own body started long before she entered Madison. In many ways, her marriage to Elias prepares her to lose control of her choices in retention, since he regularly pressures her into decisions she does not agree with, even if she believes she is consenting to it. While Sara loves her children and longs to return to them, this passage makes it clear that Elias is at the root of her retention—pressuring her to have children is the event that made her retention possible at all. The syntax, especially the abrupt shift in the last sentence, signals an internal unraveling—Sara’s body making a decision before her mind accepts the cost.

“Whoever decided on white wasn’t exactly concerned about practicality, Sara thinks; she has to pour two heaping scoops of company-approved whitening chemical over every load. On the other hand, white reinforces the idea that Madison isn’t a prison or a jail. In red or orange, the retainees might be perceived as dangerous inmates, the type that should be housed with convicted murderers or drug dealers. In brown or stripes, they might seem like petty thieves, shoplifters, or fraudsters.”

Color functions both literally and metaphorically here: White becomes a sanitized symbol that hides structural violence under a guise of purity. At the same time, identical uniforms convey a neutrality and uniformity that dehumanizes the retainees in a very purposeful way. Madison is not intended to convey that they are criminals, but Safe-X benefits from people perceiving the retainees as less-than-human and potentially dangerous—and the uniforms create a socially-acceptable shorthand for doing so. This language reinforces how institutions manipulate visual symbols to create implicit hierarchies.

“At the time, she thought these incidents were trivial, if she thought about them at all, but they were recorded on smartphones, documented in screenshots, or watched from hidden security cameras, then stored in online databases. She can’t erase or escape her past; the incidents remain on OmniCloud, to be read, scored, and interpreted however the algorithm’s designers intended. We blame the algorithm for our predicament, she thinks, but the algorithm was written by people.”

Although AI is a key symbol and plot element in the novel, the narrative makes it consistently clear that people are to blame for their own technology. AI cannot be held responsible for a decision—the people who made it and put their biases and beliefs into it, however subconsciously, must be held liable for the mistakes it makes. Sara’s world suffers, however, because people cannot conceptualize that a machine is only as good as the people who make it. They view technology as infallible, and the orders it gives as ideal—and don’t consider the drawbacks until it is too late. The recursive logic of “we blame the algorithm [...] but the algorithm was written by people” is syntactically mimetic: It loops, just like the flawed systems it critiques.

“The bus that pulled up to the curb seemed to have been bought at a salvage sale, hastily painted black, and imprinted with the logo of Safe-X. Through the barred windows, the other retainees watched as Sara was brought on board. As soon as she took her seat, a message played on the stereo, announcing that Safe-X was acting in loco magistratus; it was allowed to conduct a forensic observation of retainees and, if necessary, to discipline them on behalf of the government.”

The grotesque juxtaposition of the van’s condition and the language of state authority underscores how corporate overreach masks itself in the formal tone of governance. The cheapness of Safe-X is emphasized through the imagery surrounding the van; Safe-X has no interest in spending money on things they deem unimportant, even the humans that suffer due to their technology and for their benefit. Safe-X’s clumsiness harms them by the end of the novel, but in this passage, the van is a symbol of control and power, even if it does not deserve to be on its own.

“His scholarship was in property law, he explained, but her case was simple enough because she had no prior arrests, had a stable home, had a full-time job and two children. And while it was extremely rare for someone with a score under 550 to end up in forensic observation, the RAA had full authority to keep her in custody because the courts defined retention as precaution, not punishment.”

This passage emphasizes that people who conform to the expectations of society are usually, but not always, going to benefit from the power structures. Sara’s life has been “perfect”—she is seemingly heterosexual, employed, and law-abiding—yet she is still retained for being human and suffering. Her lawyer’s words seem innocent at first but are deeply sinister, reminding the reader that living a life outside of the norm will always lead to punishment under authoritarianism.

“Perhaps she lacks that kind of insight because she is a historian, her eye cast on the past in order to explain the present. She must turn her gaze to the future instead, start thinking like a scientist, or better yet like a software engineer. Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.”

This passage is ominous but ultimately neutral about the positive or negative effects of engineers and changing technology. Software engineers have done irreparable harm to Sara’s world, but she seems to accept these changes as part of life. She does not particularly want to go back to a world with matchmakers and town criers but seems to quietly accept that the loss of these things has changed what it means to be human. This rhetorical structure builds toward a prophetic tone, echoing the theme of language’s devaluation in the face of algorithmic authority.

“Responsibility? Responsibility’s got nothing to do with it. People can’t get decent insurance without good HF scores from one of the big companies, so there’s a lot more demand for licensed trainers these days.”

This passage helps to build the world of the near future, where Risk scores are not the only number tied to a person’s identity and safety. The idea of a Health and Fitness score dictating access to insurance is ableist. While Sara’s father has Exo-Legs for a disability, few other characters have disabilities, and the medical needs of the women are repeatedly ignored, emphasizing that health and fitness are privileges few can afford, and dying may be the only other option. While Eisley cannot understand it as such, this version of the future is almost eugenicist in nature, emphasizing that only those who “deserve” to survive will be helped.

“The law declared [Elias’s Irish ancestor] an immigrant, allowed her to settle in New York, to chase the American dream (that most seductive of fantasies). Twenty years later, Elias’s grandfather Hernan crossed the border in the back of a truck. He was the same age Roisin had been, was fleeing the same circumstances, but in the intervening decades the law had changed. Now he was a removable alien, a drain on public resources, a carrier of disease, a potential criminal who should be detained and deported without delay.”

While used to emphasize the changing and flexible definition of the law and what is acceptable in society, this passage makes little to no reference to the racial dynamics affecting the treatment of Elias’s Irish and Mexican ancestors. It is implied in the language used to describe the public’s opinion of Hernan, but not explicitly stated. This characterizes Sara as someone for whom racial issues are obvious and lived—she does not need to acknowledge them out loud for them to be a pulsing reality to her world.

“For starters, the RAA is missing information from all kinds of people: undocumented immigrants, people without fixed addresses, the few among the elderly or the disabled who don’t use smart devices, along with cranks, hermits, bohemians, and objectors.”

Sara’s America—perhaps like our own—divides people into two groups: evil and good, with retainees in the center, strung between the two groups until an authority can decide where they belong. This passage reminds the reader that those who do not conform to the demands of authoritarianism are not allowed to exist in a third space—they are evil until proven otherwise. The words Sara uses emphasizes this, however subconsciously; she describes people as “hermits” and “cranks” without any thought of how they view the world.

“Too critical of a president, then not critical enough. How an artist’s reputation changes in the course of half a century! Sara is used to historical reassessments, from the mild to the radical. When she wrote her dissertation she fashioned new arguments out of old facts, using as bonding material whatever evidence or context other scholars hadn’t considered before. Reevaluating kings, presidents, or rebel leaders chipped away at their reputations as noble statesmen and helped advance scholarship.”

This passage goes on to discuss how Sara’s own life is being reevaluated as a historical figure, and how unfair that feels, yet historical analysis and reassessment are quite different from the analytics that define who a person is in the novel. Sara ultimately concludes that neither approach is fully correct, as nothing—no one person, no algorithm—can understand a human being in a holistic and useful way. While the book does not address how this changes Sara’s relationship with history and scholarship, it is implied that she will be unable to return to it in the same way as before.

“Sara suppresses the urge to snap; after all, she was once the new girl, too, she knows what it’s like to cling to the belief that the system works, despite its shocking flaws. Eisley is desperate to be out when her twenty-one-day hold is completed, ergo the only people who are held longer at Madison must have done something to deserve it. She’s still in denial, Sara thinks.”

This passage interrogates the nuances of the concept of “innocence,” using contrast between Sara’s jaded perspective and Eisley’s black-and-white point of view to establish that innocence is relative to the power that decides it. Eisley’s inability to recognize that the other women are just like her is what empowers the system of retainment in the first place. She sees other people as capable of wrongdoing but not herself, and cannot acknowledge that they might be “innocent,” because that means acknowledging that either the system is wrong or she is equally capable of breaking the rules. The line “she’s still in denial” resonates with a cruel irony—Sara once shared that belief.

“The blame in his voice takes Sara’s breath away. Her life has been stolen from her, but instead of the thieves who ran off with it, she’s the one her husband thinks is at fault. Is this why he hasn’t written to her in a month? Is he starting to believe what the RAA says about her, that she’s secretly a delinquent, that she could be a danger to him?”

While Sara’s worries here are never confirmed outright, The Ethics of Surveillance and the Importance of Personal Privacy relates here to the idea that people believe the system cannot harm them until it is already too late. This passage illuminates the difficulties at the heart of Sara’s marriage but also shows that people external to Sara’s situation are incapable of understanding what she is going through, no matter how close to her they might be. All Elias can understand is that Sara is not with him, and his life is harder as a result. Like Eisley, he seems incapable of empathizing with her, because he believes the justice system is correct. Elias, unlike Sara, has never had to interrogate injustice in the way the women in retention have to. The rhetorical question “is he starting to believe...” mirrors Sara’s own unraveling, as language fails to anchor her to the people she once trusted.

“So it would seem that maintaining professional skills isn’t enough of a reason to let Marcela have her musical instrument. There is a perverse logic to this denial; after all, no woman who’s been at Madison past the initial twenty-one-day hold has managed to keep her job in the free world. Why should a musician be treated differently than an office clerk or a truck driver?”

This passage reflects that retention, just like actual imprisonment, has the same effect of permanently ruining inmates’ lives. Inmates who are released from prison face trouble getting jobs because of the mark on their record, which often drives them to further crime out of desperation, creating a cycle that benefits nobody but the government, who can use them for labor, much like in the novel. The women in retention have no hope of returning to the life they left behind; their jobs move on, the world moves on, and their families might even reject them. There are no regulations to ensure that the “innocent” people in retention maintain some semblance of normalcy after their retention, ultimately proving that the government doesn’t believe them to be innocent at all in the first place.

“Women used to leave anonymous notes for each other on the cubicle walls of that stall. Don’t go to lunch with Reynolds. Watch out for Ruiz. Walker gets handsy. Then H.R. disciplined a female programmer who was caught with a permanent marker and issued a policy against leaving notes in the bathroom.”

This passage makes it clear that women are not treated equally since the powers that be use algorithms to claim innocence from bias. HR, here, functions as an antagonist, representing the faceless corporation that, like Madison, enforces rules with little regard for the individuals harmed by their regulations. The general message of the novel continues in a microcosm here: While groups like HR and Dreamsaver are made up of individuals, they cannot be trusted to treat people like humans and always operate in the interest of money and maintaining power. Here, language is a life-saving tool among women, and its criminalization reflects the novel’s theme of The Personal Harm of the Prison Industrial Complex by silencing dissent through institutional control.

“As if their situations were the same. As if he were separated from his children, kept in the dark about his family’s well-being, prevented from using the phone in the middle of a wildfire. But never mind moral principle or basic fairness: even by appealing purely to his self-interest, she can’t convince him to keep the booths open.”

Hinton’s humanity is a constant question throughout the novel; he views himself as better than the women, yet he tries to use pathos to appeal to Sara to make her cooperate—not because he views her as a person, but because it makes his life easier and makes him look better to his superiors. This passage emphasizes that even though Hinton is selfish, he is more concerned with enforcing the laws he creates than he is with directly benefiting himself. Hinton’s actions are in favor of Safe-X, not himself, because he believes supporting his employer will benefit him in the long run—even though, as proven previously, Safe-X is incapable of “caring” for anything.

“Sara quickly makes a second face covering and puts it on, adjusting the straps until it fits snugly. The reflection that meets her in the mirror reminds her of the pandemic of her childhood. Unlike some of her classmates in school she never minded wearing masks: they concealed her bouts of acne, the rage she felt whenever a boy told her she needed to smile more, her impatience with strangers who asked, ‘So what are you?’”

This passage is the only point that might ground the story in a timeline some 20 or 30 years ahead of the publication date, since it indirectly references the COVID-19 pandemic with descriptions of masks and an unnamed pandemic. The imagery of Sara’s childhood conjures three common experiences: the experience of being a teenager, the experience of being a woman, and the experience of being a person of color. These three images help to ground Sara as a real person with real experiences, making her more relatable to the reader and emphasizing that she is, for all her skills and unique traits, an average person.

“With a flick of the wrist he unlocks his baton and raises it, which is enough to force the retainees to comply, but the heat and the rank smell of the women have made him pale and a minute later he faces the wall and throws up. From then on, the retainees are ordered to remain six feet away from the trolleys. No one who approaches without verbal permission from a guard will be given any food.”

The lack of empathy and humanity is reemphasized here with the response to the guard vomiting; rather than trying to address the root of the problem (the lack of hygiene the women are afforded), Safe-X prevents the problem from happening in a much cheaper way by using their authority to punish the women, instead. The guard is a microcosm of this problem, too; just like Safe-X, he treats the women with violence (raising his baton) instead of trying to help them through their panic and hunger. The women are treated like less than animals yet blamed when they act as a pack, which argues that people can only be as good as their environment allows them to be.

“She’s been so focused on her case, from its absurd start through its successive delays, that despite being at Madison for ten months she’s failed to see just how much she has in common with the other retainees. Not just the struggle to be free or the rage against stupid rules, but the vulnerability that this place has exposed in them.”

The divisive nature of Madison recurs again and again throughout the story; Sara’s commitment to seeing the other women as allies rather than enemies is what ruins the facility, since unity allows them to strike and damage the system. Madison benefits off of the women staying focused only on themselves and their needs, since that keeps their heads down and focused on how they can follow the rules instead of finding a way out of them. Sara’s recognition of the vulnerable humanity of herself and the other women is her first step towards cognitive, if not physical, freedom.

“Everyone tries to obey the rules, in the beginning. But inevitably, even when they don’t mean to, they break one. Safe-X makes its largest share of profits not from the observation period of twenty-one days that the RAA has mandated but from the postponements it generates through its complicated disciplinary system.”

This is the most directly the novel approaches The Personal Harm of the Prison Industrial Complex, arguing that retention is not a drain on public resources, but an economic boon to the companies that rely on the retention centers for free labor and contract work. This creates an inescapable cycle of incompetence and maliciousness; while Sara’s case faces issues largely due to incompetence, there is no real motivation to treat her case competently while she is providing benefits to the system and to Madison’s labor force. Worse, the desperation of the retainees to prove themselves “good” means that they will labor safely and consistently, which only compounds the motivation of Safe-X to keep the women as long as possible and only free the ones who do not help their goals.

“All Jackson has to do is wait, Sara thinks; she’ll have a fresh batch of workers to assign in a few weeks, or maybe just days. Yet she’s determined to fill up every spot on her schedule, even in the middle of an outbreak. Jackson seems troubled by the possibility of a strike—worried, even—despite the fact that she’s a lowly worker, too, replaceable the moment she outlasts her usefulness to the company.”

Sara’s changing perception of the world allows her to recognize what Jackson cannot—that Jackson is just as much a prisoner of the system as the women are. Jackson grabs for security in the same ways the retainees do, but believes she is above them because she has a bit more power. Sara’s recognition of the true source of their problems—Safe-X, and companies in general—frees her to recognize Jackson as a human being, even if she cannot forgive her for the ways she harms the women under her control.

“But the company already has their dreams, so what do they want? They want more, is what she can guess, more than collecting and storing and weighing and interpreting the dreams of every person who has ever used a Dreamsaver. The only way to increase profit continually is to extract more from the same resources.”

This book is ultimately an interrogation of what happens when capitalism intrudes too much on one’s inner life, and this passage argues succinctly that if the system of capitalism could profit from dreams, they would profit until dreams had no meaning. A person’s inner life, in Sara’s world, is only as good as the profit it can make; being “human” is less important than being a resource for an ever-hungry system of companies. There is no clear end to this hunger, except that eventually the resources will run out—whether through people losing themselves or through dreams ceasing to have meaning. The cadence—“collecting and storing and weighing and interpreting”—builds a hypnotic rhythm, mimicking the extractive, endless loop of capitalist hunger.