Review: Your thoughts can be used against you in ‘Dream Hotel’

“He points the scanner at the back of her skull, and the scanner gives a beep, indicating that the neuroprosthetic on Retainee M-7493002 [username: Sara T. Hussein] hasn’t been tampered with overnight.”

Where are we? It’s no hotel, that’s for sure.

As Laila Lalami’s sixth book, “The Dream Hotel,” opens, her protagonist is awakening in room 208 of a creepy place called Madison, a Los Angeles-area elementary school that has been converted for use as a “retention center” by the Risk Assessment Administration.

Following a terrible mass shooting event at the Super Bowl — as we learn from a newspaper article included in “Dream Hotel,” along with various memos, meeting minutes and legal documents that are interspersed throughout the chapters — the government now uses data analytics to identify potential criminals and retain them for observation. Sara, who works as an archivist at the Getty Museum, was pulled aside by officers at LAX upon her return from a conference in London. What followed did not go well.

After the birth of her twins just a couple of years earlier, Sara became so sleep-deprived she decided to follow her husband’s example and get a Dreamsaver. This implant allows users to sleep more deeply and restfully in fewer hours. Unfortunately, it also collects data that the manufacturer supplies to the Risk Assessment Administration for analysis. And that is what has gotten Sara in trouble. Based on her dreams, there is an imminent risk that Sara will kill her husband.

In an interview, Lalami has explained that the surveillance state she imagines in “The Dream Hotel” has its roots in a Google notification she received one morning in 2013: “If you leave right now, you will make it to YogaWorks at 7.28.”

Lalami had never told Google what day of the week or what time of day she went to yoga, or even that she did. After remarking to her husband that soon, the only privacy we’ll have will be in our dreams, the what-if that generated this novel occurred to the novelist, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Moor’s Account” and a National Book Award finalist for “The Other Americans.”

It’s a fascinating what-if, and in the process of exploring it, Lalami has created the exception to the usual problems with using dreams in novels. Far from heavy-handed or distracting, Sara’s dreams during her incarceration are an integral part of the plot, intertwined with her waking reality at Madison. Her fraught relationship with a good-looking but often cruel guard named Hinton is complicated when he confiscates and reads her journal.

“If you dream of having sex with me,” he tells her, “all you had to do was ask.”

The details of life at Madison as well as the personalities of the other inmates, all women, are richly imagined, recalling Jessamine Chan’s “The School for Good Mothers,” which also took readers to a near future in which a nonwhite protagonist is imprisoned in a women’s lockup by the surveillance state.

Like that book, “The Dream Hotel” entertains even as it tolls its warning.

The Dream Hotel

By: Laila Lalami.

Publisher: Pantheon, 322 pages, $29.