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The Dream Hotelis a cautionary tale about what can happen when you dont read the terms of service.
Theycansee the future, possessing a gift thats ineffable, beyond understanding.
InThe Dream Hotel, the supernatural is in short supply.
The algorithm knows what youre thinking of doing, before even you know it, one character says.
Thats a scientific fact.
Suspicion comes to rest on a neighboring business owner.
Was it an interpersonal dispute, a racist animus, both?
Her dreams have put her over the line.
Sara is taken to a California womens facility for whats supposed to be a 21-day monitoring period.
Her fellow inmates are similarly situated, the whole scenario instantly recognizable.
The women pay exorbitant fees to communicate with loved ones on the outside.
If they want free tampons, they have to consent to getting their periods tracked.
Sara has training as a historian of post-colonial Africa, specializing in independence movements and border formation.
Even the risk score that governs Saras fate is no great novelty it sounds like a credit score.
The claustrophobic authorial perspective, coupled with narration in the present tense, creates a creeping sense of disorientation.
On some level, Sara knows how ludicrous this all is.
Both Sara and the algorithm have similar questions about her character, but with a critical distinction.
Am I a good person?
Sara, meanwhile, starts to better appreciate the ordinariness of her experience of incarceration.
The cure isnt solitude but solidarity.
Data without context is pretext, to borrow a phrase; no woman is an island.
Its worse than all that, an alarmingly likely approximation of what were all careering toward.
