If you’re reading this article on your phone or computer, you might agree that modern technology is certainly handy, but in Laila Lalami’s latest novel, “The Dream Hotel,” that ease and efficiency give way to a nightmarish new reality.

“It’s so convenient, and it’s one way that we connect with other people who are also using these products,” Lalami tells me from a train into New York City, where she kicks off her book tour this week.

She wanted the main character in “The Dream Hotel” to be someone like her, who uses technology without always reading the terms of service. She knows these companies are using this data, but again, “It’s just so convenient.”

In the book’s not-so-distant future, the Risk Assessment Administration has become a ruling force in American society. Following a mass shooting at a Super Bowl halftime show in which 86 people were killed on live television (and many more off-screen), Democratic lawmakers called for strict gun control, while Republicans argued that the fault lay solely with the gunman.

In the wake of the massacre, the Crime Prevention Act was passed, and the RAA was charged with identifying and detaining people likely to commit violent crimes by using surveillance, policing and algorithms.

Enter Sara, a Getty Museum archivist and new mother of twins. Sleep-deprived and riddled with postpartum anxiety, Sara opts to get a Dreamsaver brain implant, which worked wonders for her husband. Whether she’d glossed over the legalese when she signed her consent, or the agreement was purposely vague, the implant would ultimately transmit and assess Sara’s dreams and ding her “risk score.”

At LAX, she’s stopped as she makes her way through customs. The algorithm has determined she’s an imminent risk to her husband, and she’ll need to be retained at Madison — aka the Dream Hotel — for a 21-day hold. Evoking Philip K. Dick’s dystopian “The Minority Report,” she’s kept under close watch for a crime she has not committed in a facility that serves as a limbo for could-be criminals.

“The attendants bristle when one of the women calls Madison a jail,” Lalami writes. “This is a retention center, they say; it’s not a prison or a jail. You haven’t been convicted; you’re not serving time. You’re being retained only until your forensic observation is complete. How much longer?, someone will always ask. Depends, the attendants say. Some retainees stay just 21 days; others have to stay a bit longer. The attendants never call the women prisoners.”

For Pulitzer Prize finalist Lalami, the idea for the novel came 10 years ago. “I was struggling to get out of bed, and the first thing I did was pull up my phone to see what time it was,” she tells me. “I saw a notification that said, ‘If you leave right now, you’ll make it to the yoga studio at 7:28,’ and I was stunned.”

She hadn’t fed her phone any information to know where she was going or when. “I was really disturbed.”

Lalami says she’d overslept that morning because of the insomnia that had long plagued her. “I thought, if there had been a device that could help you sleep, I bet I would get it, even if it violated my privacy.”

This line of thinking got her started on the novel, but after 70 pages or so, she stashed it in a drawer and penned “The Other Americans” instead, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2020, with a canceled book tour due to the pandemic, she began again on “The Dream Hotel.”

Lalami says she wrote the novel independently of what’s going on in Washington today. “The forces that we are dealing with, in a sense, are almost nonpartisan. We’re dealing with corporations that have essentially laid claim to our private data, and they are seeking to make money off of it. They are going to pursue that goal regardless of which party is in the administration,” she says.

Novels can take years to write and another year to edit and schedule for release, and “The Dream Hotel” hit bookshop shelves this week. Lalami says people are naturally making connections with a “certain unelected billionaire’s actions” but that everything she set out to explore in the novel — particularly surveillance technology — were forces she’d seen that were already in motion in this country.

“For example, the power of predictive technology in the world of criminal justice: There are certain police departments that use predictive technology or use certain software to help them detect where crime might happen,” she says. “So really what I was doing is taking these ideas that have percolated in U.S. society and pushing them all the way to their logical end.”Dreams, she continues, are the ultimate form of freedom, “completely private, entirely designed by us and for us, that no one else can access.”

“The Dream Hotel” raises the question, what happens when your own rogue subconscious is used against you?

“Dreams are completely outside of our control,” she continues. “They’re the realm of the imagination and emotion. You can have a dream and it can be a tightly controlled narrative. It can last a long time, or it can just feel like a series of unconnected images. I’m sure there are certain dreams that you can easily recall and others that you realize you dreamt that you forgot.”

By penetrating the dream world in her sixth novel, Lalami was trying to push surveillance to its limits, not just to terrify the reader but to get them to consider that even in such a reality, “we are not without agency.”

In the opening chapter, she writes: “No matter how long he takes to get to her, she doesn’t lower her head to make it easier for him to reach behind her ear. It’s a small thing, but it’s what she can do to signal her resistance.”

“I do think that we have agency on multiple levels and power on multiple levels, but we tend to relinquish that because of our convenience and the connection that technology gives us,” she says.

“That’s what makes it hurt. The book starts with that veil falling off of her eyes and the realization that, wait a minute, all of this data is now being used against me. And it’s the realization that she’s in trouble.”