63 pages • 2-hour read
The Dream Hotel
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Part 3-Part 4, Chapter 16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains discussions of gender discrimination and physical and emotional abuse.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
Eisley Richardson, whose real name is Julie Renstrom, wakes in bed with her husband, Peter, on her first day of work after her staged retention. She reads the gossip columns and contemplates her failing sex life with her husband. She hurts her hip getting out of bed because she worked out too hard the day prior. Julie gets ready for the day, worrying about her relationship with her teenaged daughter, Ruby, and then goes down to breakfast, where her younger son, Max, ignores them all in favor of his tablet.
Outside of Julie’s workplace—Dreamsaver Inc.—there are protesters gathered in force since Dreamsaver’s security system was leaked, revealing that dream data from important people is kept private but ordinary dream data is sold. Julie tries to distract herself from the pain with breakfast in the cafeteria. She soon finds a new engineering hire, a beautiful young woman named Souza, crying in the bathroom; she assumes Souza has been hazed by Gaspard, one of the senior engineers, but learns instead that she works for another one, McClure. She tries to figure out what McClure could have done, but HR disciplines women who try to covertly leave notes in the bathroom for each other. Souza refuses to share.
Julie returns to her desk in R&D and types up a report on her research from Madison. She researched whether targeted advertising could work in the dream device, testing half of the women in Madison by implanting images of carrots into their dreams and seeing if they bought more carrots from the commissary afterwards. The women, who consented to the experiment through the terms and conditions, had no idea they were being tampered with or that their responses were being recorded through Julie’s AR contacts. To her disappointment, the numbers she runs from the experiment are unimpressive, meaning McClure will likely get the promotion she’s been promised.
In their team meeting that afternoon, Julie’s coworkers are impressed that she made it out of Madison okay, since they believe people in retention are dangerous. Her coworkers blandly discuss their weekend plans and then provide work updates to Gaspard. One coworker is working on blocking nightmares, another is working on smoothing out the potential for artistic images in the dream AI, and McClure is working on a social feature to allow people to record and share their dreams. The company hopes to use the latter to smooth over the protests. Julie’s data does not impress Gaspard until she shares about Sara, who dreamed of actual carrots instead of the product and had a subsequent spike in purchases, implying that people need to come up with their own interpretations of data instead of being fed images.
Later, Julie studies videos of Sara, desperate to understand more about her and why her brain interpreted the carrot data more personally. The coder of the advertising data, Nordell, visits her and shares that there’s nothing in what he wrote that could have created the effect on Sara. Julie is delighted. That night, she has dinner with the Nordells but takes pain medication to get through the meal. Ruby won’t share the results of a math test with her. Nordell shares that McClure was placed on administrative leave, which Julie knows is because she went to HR on Souza’s behalf. Peter defends McClure, not having listened to Julie’s complaints about him, and in retaliation, Julie shares that the recipe for dinner came from AI, not from Peter’s family like he claimed. Julie smells smoke as she tries to relax at the dinner table.
Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary
The fire horn goes off at Madison, but to Sara’s shock, no evacuation order is issued. Emily notices the abundant smoke and wind, suggesting imminent danger. Hinton performs the morning check while wearing a mask; he refuses to answer their worried questions about the fire, saying that the fire alarm is for the attendants, not the retainees. Sara, worried about her family, rushes to the PostPal line, Hinton closes the line down for the entire day. Sara tries to argue that PostPal will notice the lack of calls, but he insists they don’t care, and an outage is normal. He argues that the hallways need to be clear for safety, but Sara knows he is just being cruel.
Breakfast is unpleasant; the fire is only three miles away, and the smoke and heat in the cafeteria is overwhelming. Emily frets angrily over their lack of emergency planning, and Marcela shares that the infirmary refused to provide masks. The power goes out, and panic sets in. Sara announces she will use her sheet to make masks for everyone, despite the harsh punishment it entails. She proposes they commandeer a truck and try to escape. Toya harshly refuses, pointing out that they’d go to prison for trying to escape, but the other women are less sure, since staying could lead to their deaths.
Emily helps Sara make masks out of her sheets to protect their lungs from the smoke. Emily and Sara try to escape, but one of the doors is locked by a keypad. They find Hinton having a panic attack in an adjacent room, and he touches his taser at the sight of them. They go to the receiving door but run into another attendant, who tells them to prepare to evacuate. The attendants, useless without their technology due to the outage, are unprepared and struggling to maintain order. Next to the buses, Hinton and another officer are waiting with zip ties in hand.
Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary
An excerpt from the Safe-X handbook describing the punishments and fines for harming or losing company property is included. For damaging the sheets, Sara could owe up to 300 dollars and have her imprisonment extended by 84 days.
Sara sits miserably on the truck, where she has been for hours; Hinton confiscated all her personal belongings, including her journal, and she doesn’t even have a tampon for a woman behind her. They finally arrive at a repurposed high school in Victorville, where they are put into a gym with blank cots. Sara tries to get in line for the bathroom, but her bladder gives way, and she soils herself. She is forced to go back into the gym without her pants on after washing them in the sink. She curls up on the floor next to Emily.
Sara dreams of Hinton having read and marked her journal, after which he puts a leash and collar on her and drags her to a cage like an animal. She wakes up to the smell of smoke and hits her head in a scuffle for the doors but wakes up again on the floor of the gym; the smoke was a nightmare. She then dreams of her brother and cousin playing zombie, with Saïd pretending to be a zombie and then turning into a skull in her hands when he attacks her. Sara finally wakes up and tries to care for herself, but she has no help or supplies.
The women stay crowded for five days with only stale food—no supplies, no air conditioning, and no answers to their questions. The guards grow increasingly strict as the women grow increasingly desperate. Emily allows Sara to read her comic book, which is mostly about trying to reconnect with one’s mother, pleasantly surprising Sara. On the sixth day, the women are taken back to Madison and find that the entire town of Ellis is unharmed.
Part 4, Chapter 16 Summary
An announcement from the CRO reveals that, to make up for lost time, the women must work 12-hour shifts to make up for lost hours on their contract. Additionally, the exercise yard, commissary, and recreation room are closed due to insufficient staff.
Sara realizes that someone has destroyed the cameras in the resident’s hall. A stomach bug sweeps through the women, affecting the shift work, and the food rots, the laundry is dirty, and the infirmary is out of tampons. Sara takes a shower but has only a dirty uniform to put on. As she goes to call Elias, the case worker whom she forced to spell out her name mocks her by spelling it out, as he usually does, but she laughs at him, stunning him into silence. The call to Elias doesn’t go through, but she receives a care package from him, which makes her wonder why Safe-X was unprepared for the emergency if Elias could send a package ahead of time.
At dinner, the women discuss the ransacking of several rooms while they were away, presumably to hunt for the saboteur of the cameras. Sara contemplates how grateful they all are for their rooms and poor food after days of starving in a gym. She realizes that the system cannot last. She announces that they must stop working and endanger the contract and the site’s profitability if they ever want to see change. She suggests the women hold a strike. Toya insists that collective organizing is a protected right but also points out that the retention center’s ambiguous state between freedom and prison blurs what rights they have, so they might as well try.
The next morning, Hinton is out sick, and Williams refuses to tell Sara what happened to him. She wants to get her notebook back from him. Emily tries to convince Sara to go to work, but Sara insists that working hasn’t helped her get out, so not working can’t harm her any further. Sara takes a leisurely morning to herself, reading the news and dwelling on childhood memories, including the irony that Zach is being recognized for public service while she has been in retention for nearly a year. When Jackson, the agent in charge of work assignments, comes to confront Sara, Sara resigns but is marked down as noncompliant. Jackson tries to push her into taking a different assignment, but Sara staunchly refuses. Jackson then tells her to try and clean herself up before her afternoon visit, startling her.
Sara goes with another retainee to the visitors’ room, where she finds Elias with the kids and the other retainee’s daughter. Elias is overjoyed to see her, having received minimal information about her whereabouts or safety. He fills her in on the kids, who are distracted by their toys and barely acknowledge her. She tells Elias about her experiences, and Elias reiterates that she just needs to follow the rules. She feels brief guilt about how many rules she has broken, then tries to remind him that things work differently inside Madison. Angie, the other retainee’s daughter, starts to cry, and Mohsin runs to comfort her; Elias explains that Angie’s mother won’t be released in time for her wedding, and Sara feels jealous. Time runs out, and Sara tries to apologize for how long her retention has been, but the apology goes nowhere. Back in the facility, she tries to get a new uniform, but the laundry room is still out of them.
Part 3-Part 4, Chapter 16 Analysis
The reveal that the women have been experimented on, with their only consent being the terms and conditions they signed prior to receiving the Dreamsaver, highlights the use of terms and conditions as a symbol of corporate exploitation. While some blame could be put on the users of the Dreamsaver for not thoroughly reading their rights, Sara makes it clear that the people who get Dreamsavers are often in dire straits, making the company’s behavior towards them manipulative regardless of legalities. The women in Madison are subject to experimentation legally due to signing the terms and conditions, but they couldn’t have known the extent of what they were signing, making it clear that true consent is unimportant to corporations like Dreamsaver. Additionally, Julie’s use of the prisoners as a control group for her experimentations emphasizes their complete dehumanization in the eyes of the public. While Julie could have legally experimented on anyone with a Dreamsaver, she chose the vulnerable, imprisoned group of retainees because they could be controlled and observed without resistance. Even if something leaked, the public would care less about the rights of a potential criminal than a law-abiding citizen. As with everything in this modernized future, everyone’s actions come down to optics, and terms and conditions control who has the power over others, whether it is fair or not. Even Julie’s professional survival depends on manipulating optics: She fabricates scientific legitimacy from coercion, hoping that the women’s invisibility will secure her promotion.
The vulnerability of the women in retention is further explored through the growing presence of the CRO, who has no interest in them except as vehicles for contract labor. Near the end of this section, the CRO makes an announcement that shift work has doubled to make up for the lost time from the wildfire. The diction in this passage is clear and straightforward, but an analysis of the meaning reveals it as insidious; while he does not say it outright, the implication of the CRO’s announcement is that the wildfire and subsequent delays were somehow the retainees’ fault. Although the smoke and wildfire would have endangered the retainees’ lives if they had stayed, the CRO punishes them for being moved during the emergency by forcing them to take on more work for a contract they didn’t even choose. The underlying implication is that, if the retainees had simply stayed through the emergency, the schedule would be on track, and there would be no danger of missing deadlines—despite this being a senseless demand that violates human rights and labor laws. This ultimately proves that the retainees’ only value is their labor, further driving Sara’s choice to hold a strike to punish Safe-X for their treatment of retainees. The notion that labor is owed regardless of circumstance turns disaster into just another metric to be balanced against profit.
The Personal Harm of the Prison Industrial Complex is further enforced by Safe-X’s refusal to provide masks to the women, despite the smoke and acrid air or permanent damage to their lungs. Sara’s choice to make masks for herself and the others out of her sheets, despite the certain punishment for her (and financial punishment for her husband), helps characterize her as compassionate and self-sacrificing. Although it benefits her to make the masks, she chooses to do so with the explicit goal of helping others. Sara recognizes in this moment that, when lives are on the line, the real yet artificial system of punishment Madison enforces is immaterial. Madison’s system only functions when everyone in the system believes in it; when the fire disrupts that, it reveals the weaknesses at the heart of the system. Sara’s refusal to cooperate with their rules punishes her but also reveals the depths of possibility within her and within other human beings. Up to this point, Sara has shown intelligence, empathy, and the capacity to question authority, but her interior life has remained largely private, filtered through memories, dreams, and quiet observations shaped by monotony and fear. Her husband and lawyer have repeatedly urged her to remain compliant, underscoring how little room she’s been given to act on her beliefs. This makes her decision to resist feel like a rupture—a surprising but decisive shift that crystallizes her emerging identity as a resistor. To free herself, Sara must recognize the value of others, and the life-threatening wildfire rips away the illusions of separation Safe-X had tried to enforce. This marks the beginning of her transition from passive observer to active resistor—someone who begins to imagine the system’s undoing.
The theme of Human Relationships as Resistance to Authoritarianism is further developed while the retainees are suffering in the gym. Sara’s one reprieve is that Emily allows her to read her comic book, despite Emily’s insecurities about her work. Sara quickly realizes that the comic book is not a simple superhero tale, but an in-depth examination of Emily’s relationship with her mother. This storytelling surprises Sara, revealing that Sara needs to put more thought into the depth of the people surrounding her. Sara is a kind person; she tries to believe in the best in others and loves deeply. At the same time, she does not open her eyes to the depth in the people around her. Emily’s comic book helps Sara recognize that all people have complexity beyond what she can fully understand. This, in turn, helps her recognize that they are stronger together than they are apart, despite—and because of—their vast differences. Only recognizing this can totally free the retainees, imperfect as Sara’s strike ends up becoming, and Emily’s comic book—representing her deepest fears, desires, and thoughts—is the door to allowing this event to take place. Sara’s emotional education here is quiet but profound: To fight a system that sees people only as data points, people must begin by truly seeing each other.
Even outside Madison, the narrative continues to trace dehumanization through Julie’s growing obsession with Sara. Julie scours video footage of her, searching for what makes Sara so “exceptional”—an attitude that reveals more about Julie’s own emptiness than Sara’s uniqueness. Julie is captivated by Sara’s interpretive anomaly: a carrot dream that resists codification. This symbol becomes a turning point in both plot and theme. In Sara’s dreams, the carrot is not a product—it is emotional, unsettling, and absurd. By refusing to dream the way she’s supposed to, Sara breaks the algorithm’s hold over her unconscious. Julie, trapped in a failing marriage and surrounded by shallow coworkers, has outsourced meaning to machines; Sara, even in captivity, continues to create it.
Sara’s defiance culminates in her proposal to strike—an extraordinary act of ethical clarity that breaks from her lawyer’s advice, her husband’s pleas, and the culture of fear that defines Madison. The strike is not only a labor action but a declaration of personhood. Her refusal to work, despite legal ambiguity, exposes the fragility of the system: Without obedience, the machine stalls. Sara’s laughter at the case worker and her calm rejection of reassignment signal a new stage in her character arc: She no longer needs the system’s permission to be whole. Even as her reunion with Elias and the children is disappointing, her clarity remains intact. She sees the vast divide between the world outside and inside Madison and knows that pretending the system is fair will not set her free.
In this section, Sara stops hoping for fairness and starts reaching for agency. Whether through masks, comic books, or refusal, she and the women around her begin to destabilize the illusion that power is total. Their humanity, multiplied through connection and clarity, becomes their resistance.
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