They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare

The expression “They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare” is Herman Roth’s sharpest account of the divide between a crowd enchanted by a presidential spectacle and a family who see danger in the country’s direction. Spoken after a low-flying plane drew cheers from the lawn, it turns a moment of public celebration into a measure of their isolation and alarm.

The Occasion

At the end of a day in Washington, the Roth family was preparing to go for a drink when a plane approached low over the Potomac. People ran onto the lawn, waved, and shouted their approval, believing that Charles A. Lindbergh was flying. The plane, a Lockheed Interceptor, crossed over Mount Vernon and banked back toward the river. Word then spread that its pilot might instead have been Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose flying, public composure, and literary reputation had made her the nation’s most admired woman.

The family watched with the crowd, but the spectacle did not produce a shared feeling of patriotic exhilaration. Back at the hotel, Herman immediately telephoned friends. He said they had known conditions were bad, but that seeing the crowd made the situation appear worse than they had understood. His phrase gives that impression its compact form: public celebration belongs to a dream, while the family’s awareness of what is happening belongs to a nightmare.

The Contrast in the Phrase

The sentence depends on its strict opposition: “they” and “we,” dream and nightmare. The crowd’s cheers make the political spectacle seem harmless, even joyous; Herman’s choice of nightmare names the family’s incompatible reading of the same scene. The flight itself is not the source of the line’s force so much as what it has inspired in everyone around them. The public response makes their foreboding visible as a separation from the surrounding community, not merely a private fear.

The phrase also preserves the scene’s moral contrast without turning into an explanation of the crowd’s motives. The lawn is full of people waving at the plane; Herman, speaking afterward to friends, insists that the celebratory appearance cannot be trusted as evidence that all is well. The image of shared national happiness is thus recast as an estrangement between those absorbed in the spectacle and those who believe they can see the danger beneath it.

Narrative Force

Philip Roth presents the line as something spoken in the immediate aftermath of the flight, then steps back to assess it: it was the most eloquent sentence he had ever heard his father speak. He adds that it may have been more precise than anything written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. That comparison links Herman’s spontaneous political judgment to the celebrated literary voice of the very figure whom the crowd may have seen at the controls.

The expression endures in the narrative because it compresses a public event and a family’s interpretation of it into one balanced sentence. Its dream-and-nightmare opposition captures the distance between spectacle and apprehension, while the narrator’s praise confirms that, for once, Herman’s spoken words achieve an exactness that the surrounding public mood cannot.