The Predictive Panopticon and Somnoptic Surveillance: Extending Foucault in Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel

Abstract

Algorithmic surveillance has become a defining feature of contemporary life. Governments and corporations increasingly deploy predictive systems that forecast human behavior from aggregated data, pre-crime risk assessment tools now inform decisions in criminal justice and immigration enforcement, and neural monitoring devices capable of tracking brain activity during sleep are entering commercial markets. These developments raise urgent questions about privacy, autonomy, and the reach of surveillance into domains once considered beyond its grasp. This research is relevant precisely because existing surveillance theory has not kept pace with these technological realities: the dominant frameworks continue to assume a conscious subject who is watched in the present, and cannot account for surveillance that predicts future crime or penetrates the unconscious mind. This article addresses that gap through a study of Laila Lalami's speculative novel The Dream Hotel (2025), which dramatizes both frontiers. Drawing on Michel Foucault's panopticism alongside the post-panoptic frameworks of Lyon, Zuboff, Deleuze, and Agamben, the article introduces two original conceptual extensions of panoptic theory: the Predictive Panopticon, which theorizes surveillance operating in the future tense through algorithmic pre-crime detention, and Somnoptic Surveillance, which theorizes the extension of the surveillant gaze into the unconscious mind through neural monitoring. The analysis demonstrates that both concepts name genuine gaps in existing theory and argues that the novel both critiques contemporary algorithmic governance and affirms the persistence of resistance within totalizing systems of control.

Keywords: Panopticism; Algorithmic Surveillance; Pre-Crime Detention; Somnoptic Surveillance; Predictive Panopticon; Resistance; Speculative Fiction