Time travel through old audio dramas

Push a button, and you travel to another world. This world is also round. Rotates occasionally. It’s a place where anti-jokes are plentiful, laughter is loud, and naiveté reaches a new level of grotesque – so much so that even Disneyland hides in the shadows.

It’s the CD audiobooks from my childhood days.

As a little girl, I was panic-stricken by the dark. Bedtime was a nightmare. I felt alone. My parents relied on audiobooks. First Papa Moll and his family, a beloved Swiss comic book, accompanied me to sleep, then the cheeky red-haired goblin Pumuckl. Other German classics such as the Diddl-mouse, a comic mouse with comically large feet, or Bibi Blocksberg, a young witch, also dropped by from time to time. I was in good company.

Somewhere along the way to present time, I lost my fear of the night. And I lost my bedtime stories.

In times like these, where reality needs a better image, I like to look back and listen to the stories that remind me of a more carefree time. Fortunately, I kept a few of my audiobooks, and proudly sold others at the children’s flea market. At the time, it was a symbolic step towards adulthood for me. If I had known then that adults like to – even have to – be children from time to time, I would have kept them all. Without any exception. Today I roam secondhand stores and scroll through resale platforms, always on the lookout for my old friends. I’m collecting audiobook by audiobook, memory by memory. Spotify? Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But why meet in a prefabricated slab of beton when the old treehouse is still standing?

Meanwhile, I’m scared more by the daylight. The feeling of a cracked CD case in my hand eases that fear, and I’m dosed in that familiarity again – it’s a comforting blanket.

I press play.

I squint at my CD player while listening to Diddl’s high-pitched mouse voice as he spouts out one well-intentioned cheese pun after another and, with the help of the zigzag time machine, finds the magic cheese stones of the legendary mummy cheese king Camembert. I realise that I, too, am in possession of a time machine.

Turns out, sweet dreams are made of cheese.