Last night I dreamed, not that I went to Manderlay again, yet again, yet again, but that I was hanging out with Emerson, Lake, and Lake’s mother, but not Palmer, of whom there was no sign. It was uneventful, as dreams go, but when I woke I did wonder what it might mean, and I decided to ask that question on Facebook Facecloth.

Answer came from William English, who wrote : “After careful consideration it seems obvious that by omitting Carl Palmer, drummer with Atomic Rooster, and substituting him with Lake’s mother, you are erasing traumatic childhood memories of a “pram cellar” (being an anagram of Carl Palmer). Am I right?”

Eek! It has all come flooding back. I shall now undergo rigorous recovered memory therapy.

Emerson (present), Lake (present), Palmer (absent), Lake’s mother (not shown)

ADDENDUM : A particularly bewildering point about this dream is that I was never an aficionado of the band John Peel invariably referred to as Emerson, Lake & Parker, and have never owned any of their music in LP or CD form, nor indeed in cassette or 8-track or mp3, nor in any other format yet dreamed up by sound reproduction boffins.