Jenna Bush Hager’s March 2025 Read With Jenna pick is a novel set in the not too distant future where even dreams are up for surveillance and can be used as evidence of a future crime.
“The Dream Hotel” by Laila Lalami follows Sara, a young mother of twins who has been detained for having dreams that indicate she might be a danger to those around her.
“They can predict that she will commit a crime,” Jenna says of Sara’s dreams. “But she’s committed nothing.”
Jenna says that if you’re traveling this month, you’re going to “want to devour this book.”
“This is a book about how technology shackles us even when it connects us, how it can make us not feel present, and it’s a commentary on that,” Jenna says. “It is a book that is filled with beautiful characters who you will never forget, and it really shows the power we all have to dream.”
"The Dream Hotel" by Laila Lalami
Lalami has previously written about immigration and identity in novels like “The Other Americans” and nonfiction like “Conditional Citizens.”
She tells TODAY.com she first got the idea for the novel when she got a Google alert on her phone over 10 years ago.
“I had overslept one morning, and the first thing I did is I picked up my phone, and, still groggy, I look and see that there’s a notification from Google,” she said. “It said, ‘If you leave right now, you’ll make it to yoga at 7:28.’ I was stunned and creeped out.”
Though Lalami was a regular yogi, she says she had never added the class to her Google Calendar.
“It’s just that every Tuesday and Thursday, I would go to the 7:30 a.m. class, and that day, the company knew that I was not in my car heading there and was alerting me: you better get up and go,” she says.
After receiving the notification, she recalls telling her husband: “Pretty soon, the only privacy any of us will have will be in our dreams.”
But then Lalami thought about if one day, even dreams could be monitored and surveilled — and what could happen. She started the book and made it about 70 pages in before she set it aside to work on another book.
Lalami picked up the project again in 2020, and it would become “The Dream Hotel,” which publishes on March 4.
Its premise? “Imagine if a tech company could know everything about you, including your dreams,” Lalami says.
“This book follows a person who, like all of us, thinks that this technological surveillance is part of our lives and is generally harmless, and comes to discover that, in fact, it can be harmful,” Lalami adds. “And in the book, she is accused of committing a crime because of her dreams. So the question becomes, how does she fight back? How does she regain her freedom?”
In “The Dream Hotel,” the protagonist Sara is arriving back from a work trip in London when she’s flagged for a further security review at LAX.
When officers determine her score — a number determined by methods of surveillance like records of her past, her social media and her dreams — is determined to be too high, she’s moved into a retention center for 21 days for observation.
When three weeks turns into several months in the center, Sara tries everything she can to lower her score and get back to her husband, twin toddlers and her job as a museum archivist.
“It’s obviously a deliberate choice to have her be an archivist, because one of the things that really struck me about all of the data that that our phones collect about us is that we’re essentially creating an archive of us,” Lalami says.
“I wanted to draw the connection between this world that we think of as futuristic and different, and say, actually, maybe it’s not all that different,” she adds. “Maybe it actually does connect to our present and also to our past.”
Lalami says the science of dreams has always fascinated her, and that she wanted to explore how dreams have been interpreted in the past to imagine how they could be used in the future.
“One of the things that I love about dreams is that they are universal, right? We all dream, all of us, across the entire species. It’s a biological need. You actually need to dream. It’s something that even infants do, apparently, and you continue dreaming your whole life,” she says.
“So we know they’re important in some way to our function, but we also have the sense that they carry symbolism and that they have meaning,” she continues.
Lalami says when she first started writing the book, she had it set in Silicon Valley, but when she returned to it in 2020, she moved the setting to LA, where she’s lived for more than half her life.
“It’s a place that I think of as always being on the brink of literal disaster, right?” she says. “I think that that sense of danger is always just so present with the state, and yet the state always manages to survive that.”
She hopes this is one of the themes readers take away from this month’s Read With Jenna pick, Lalami says.
“One of the things that happened for me during the writing of the book is that it gave me hope. It made me think that we, all of us, actually have the tools to fight back against surveillance. Maybe it can be something small, it can be something large, but we all have the power to to fight back against this technological surveillance,” she says. “We are not powerless.”
