The Dream Hotel

The Dream Hotel is a Pulitzer-nominated 2025 dystopian novel by Laila Lalami. It explores the “retainment” of Sara Hussein, a 38-year-old museum archivist who is detained by a private firm on behalf of the government based on her risk score, a number calculated by an algorithm assessing her dreams, lifestyle, and connections with others. Lalami, who has a PhD in Linguistics and is a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, writes literary criticism and fiction. Her novels focus on historical fiction or immigrant narratives. The Dream Hotel is speculative fiction, set in a near-future America shaped by the potential outcomes of the current AI boom. As Sara struggles to drive her risk score down by obeying the harsh rules of the facility, she contemplates issues of privacy, guilt, freedom, and the concept of criminality itself.

This guide is based on the 2025 Pantheon Books hardback.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of child death, gender discrimination, racism, sexual content, and physical and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Since 100 people were shot on live television during a Super Bowl game, the Risk Assessment Administration has been using devices like Dreamsaver, a wearable technology that records and analyzes people’s dreams, and complex AI algorithms to track the potential of citizens committing crimes. People with risk scores above 500 are detained by private contractors until their scores return to safe levels. However, since the companies benefit from the retainees’ free labor, the facilities have extensive rules for release. The retainees also must buy basic privileges, like mail or snacks. These services are cheap and often fail.

Sara Hussein, a 38-year-old archivist, wakes up on her birthday in detainment at Madison, a former elementary school repurposed by the contractor Safe-X. Sara has been in detainment for 10 months, far beyond the standard 21 days, and without a hearing due to delays. She was detained after a conference for accidentally lying to law enforcement about who funded the trip, for being accused of harassment by a sick passenger on the plane, and for dreaming about endangering her husband’s life. Sara experienced insomnia and got the Dreamsaver device to help her, but the company has sold her data to the government for security purposes. During her first few days in detainment, she racked up more infractions and was even tased for trying to check the spelling of her name on an official’s computer. In detainment, she struggles with her delayed grief from her mother’s death to cancer and her guilt over her brother’s death when they were children, as he drowned while she was supposed to be watching him.

Sara’s husband, Elias, and their young twins, Mohsin and Mona, are outside. Sara cautiously befriends a firefighter named Emily, a young musician named Marcela, an older accounting clerk named Lucy, an insurance claims adjuster named Toya, and a young woman named Victoria. She has an intense dislike for, and strange attraction to, the head guard at the facility, Hinton. The guards at the facility regularly make up rules for the inmates, but claiming harassment against the guards is impossible, since the facility is not legally a prison. Madison is underfunded, despite Safe-X’s success, with the CRO refusing to give the workers basic supplies and forcing them to make the women work longer hours to improve Safe-X’s profits. The women struggle for basic supplies and sacrifice their privacy for medical needs like tampons or medications.

On her birthday, Sara meets a new woman at the facility, Eisley, and waits for a note or package from her family, which never comes. She goes to work assessing the realism of AI-generated images for a contract between Safe-X and a moviemaking firm, NovusFilm. Sara has more dreams about causing her husband’s death by accident and tries to befriend Eisley, but she and the other women find Eisley’s feelings about detainment unsettling. She believes they all did something to deserve it, except her.

Sara struggles to get her PostPal service working and has unsettling dreams about having sex with Hinton, which she blames on her deteriorating relationship with her husband, who is in debt and struggling to care for the twins alone. She works in the laundry room with her friend Toya; the heat forces them to take off their shirts, but they are found by Hinton, who punishes Sara by forcing her to layer on multiple shirts until she nearly passes out from the heat. Sara’s attorney has told her to stay out of trouble and follow the rules, but she knows that there is no way to do that when the system thrives on the women making mistakes.

Sara helps Marcela write a request for a guitar, as Sara’s request to use a room for prayer was accepted some time previously. Despite the poor conditions at Madison, work crews arrive to expand the building, which unsettles her. Soon after, Lucy is freed, but Marcela accuses Lucy of being a scammer and a pedophile, starting a fight between them. Toya and Sara, who try to stop the fight, are written up as participants. Sara calls Elias, who is dismissive, but he sends her a care package and a birthday card from the twins.

Sara’s cousin, Zach Miller, writes her a letter asking if he can help; Zach’s false criminal accusations added to Sara’s algorithm score negatively, so she ignores him. She has an unsettling dream about carrots, later revealed to be an experiment done by Dreamsaver to test if the dream device could be used to plant advertisements subconsciously. Eisley Richardson is released and returns to her life as Julie Renstrom, an employee of Dreamsaver sent to observe the women for the advertising experiment. She struggles to readapt after her retention and the sexism she and other women face in the industry. She is curious about Sara, the only person who transformed the advertising data into something creative in her dream.

After Eisley’s release, wildfire sweeps through California. Despite the smoke, they are not provided with masks or medical care. Sara and Emily rip up sheets to make masks and try to plan an escape. Before they can escape, they are evacuated to a high school, but Hinton confiscates Sara’s personal belongings, including the dream journal she was keeping as evidence of her innocence. Conditions at the high school are terrible; the women are underfed and forced to stay in filthy clothes. Sara’s bladder gives out, and she soils her clothing, and other women are denied menstrual supplies and ruin their uniforms. The guards and attendants only grow stricter.

After returning to Madison, the women and attendants begin to succumb to the norovirus, hampering the facility’s ability to function. Victoria damaged the cameras before their evacuation, granting everyone several weeks of privacy, but she is found out, and her stay is extended by months. Sara realizes that the facility will lose profits if the women go on strike. She quits her job, which exponentially damages her risk score. Julie/Eisley emails Sara and accidentally reveals her identity, and Sara uses this to show the other women how dehumanized they are. Despite the risk to her family and her freedom, Sara convinces 10 of the other women to go on strike and extorts Hinson into returning her notebook. He refuses to return it unless she gets a job, so she allows him to keep it. Sara and the striking women are punished through loss of privileges but maintain their stance, severely risking the contracts Safe-X has with other companies. Safe-X’s attempts to reward the women into working also fails.

Eventually, Sara’s risk to the company becomes so great that the CRO expedites her hearing. Although the hearing refuses to acknowledge that the algorithm could be wrong, Sara eventually consents to freeing Safe-X of liability to return home. She struggles to adapt to her home life, seeing it as too luxurious and free. She decides to contact her fellow retainee Toya, using her father’s phone to avoid putting herself at risk again.