The Dream as a Diasporic Para‑technological Allegory in Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel

Abstract

This paper examines Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (2025) as a technological dystopia that exposes the neoliberal extension of market‑driven rationality into the human psyche. Neoliberalism attempts to extend the figure of the homo economicus into a seamless homo technologicus seeking to capture even the most intimate terrains of subjectivity—dreams, emotions, and aspirations. The novel dramatizes neoliberal ambitions to render the subconscious a site of surveillance and control through the Dreamsaver implant and its risk‑assessment algorithm. This article argues that Lalami’s narrative imagines dreams as the last resistant territory of human subjectivity within a neoliberal technological order that seeks to transform consciousness into data. Dreams emerge as para‑technological allegories that are ungovernable, resisting complete datafication. By combining Romantic conceptions of imagination with diasporic experiences of displacement and belonging, the novel reveals dreams as spaces that resist algorithmic capture and preserve forms of emotional knowledge unavailable to technological governance. As sites where “emotions are recollected in tranquility,” dreams position introspection as the last frontier of our humanity, suggesting that reducing experience to measurable data threatens forms of subjectivity that depend on ambiguity, memory, imagination, and emotional complexity.