The Cereal Box Multiverse

Three years ago, before the first bag was sealed and before Merlin had a proper home on a label, we kept coming back to one strange, simple memory.

Cereal boxes.

Not just the cereal. The boxes.

The colors. The characters. The puzzles on the back. The way the box didn’t just hold food. It held attention and imagination. It held a few quiet minutes before the world sped up.

When we started Merlin’s Munchies Coffee Company, we weren’t just thinking about flavor profiles. We were thinking about mornings. About how fast they move once you grow up. About how most adults wake up and immediately sprint into their day. Alarms, emails, responsibilities, traffic. Yuck!

We kept asking ourselves one question.

What if coffee could do what cereal boxes used to do?

What if, before the rush begins, someone sits down with a fresh cup and instead of staring at a screen, they look at something playful? Something colorful. Something that makes them pause for even thirty seconds.

What if our labels could do to adults what cereal boxes did to us as kids?

Not distract, but interrupt in the best possible way.

Maybe they smile. Maybe they sit and enjoy the artwork. Maybe they let their eyes wander across the details the way we used to trace mazes with our fingers. Maybe they take a breath instead of racing out the door. Our hope was that a few minutes might shift the tone of an entire day.

Since this is Fruity Cereal Week and Multiverse Monday, it only feels fair that we meld the two together.

Today, this isn’t just about cereal. It’s about time.

Why Time Felt Slower When We Were Kids

When you were eight years old, mornings felt expansive.

Five minutes felt like fifteen. A single bowl of cereal somehow contained an entire world. The front of the box was chaos and color. The back was a portal. Word searches. Mazes. Crosswords. Cartoon characters with wild proportions and even wilder confidence.

You weren’t just eating. You were immersed. Sometimes immersion can change perception. 

There is actually a real reason childhood feels longer in memory. It isn’t just nostalgia, but neuroscience.

Researchers have found that novelty activates the hippocampus, the brain’s memory encoder. When something is new, it gets marked more vividly. More novelty means more memory markers, and more markers stretch your sense of time in retrospect.

As kids, almost everything was new. As adults, much of it repeats. The brain compresses repetition, which is why time feels faster. It is not speeding up. We are just encoding less.

Those cereal mornings were not just nostalgic snapshots. They were high definition memories your brain refused to file away as ordinary. They were the kind of mornings that felt like Harry discovering Diagon Alley for the first time. Ordinary on the surface, but once you stepped in, the world expanded into something magical.

Inside Out and the Expanding Mind

If you’ve seen Inside Out, you remember how Riley’s memories are stored as glowing spheres, with each one shaped by emotion. The more intense the feeling, the brighter and more permanent the memory. Her childhood core memories literally power islands of personality: Goofball Island, Friendship Island, Hockey Island, etc.

As she grows up, some of those islands begin to crumble. The bright, colorful simplicity of childhood blends into more complex emotions. The days aren’t as purely joyful or purely silly anymore. They become layered.

When novelty gives way to routine, experience flattens. When attention narrows, days blur together. But when Riley reconnects , she allows emotion and presence back in and islands rebuild.

A single shift in perception changes everything. Which brings us back to the multiverse.

The Multiverse Might Be Perceptual

Multiverse Monday usually sends us somewhere cosmic. Parallel timelines, quantum entanglement, hidden layers beneath the visible world. We imagine branching galaxies and alternate versions of ourselves making slightly different decisions in distant dimensions.

But what if the multiverse isn’t always "out there"?

What if sometimes it’s in here. Inside perception itself?

In quantum mechanics, one of the most famous experiments is the double-slit experiment. Without turning this into a physics lecture, the takeaway is simple: particles behave differently when observed.

At very small scales, reality appears to shift depending on whether it is being measured. Observation changes outcome.

Now, no, staring intensely at your cereal box did not alter subatomic probability waves in your kitchen. But attention absolutely alters experience.

When we move through adulthood on autopilot, perception narrows. We encode less. Days compress. Reality feels smaller not because it is smaller, but because we are interacting with less of it.

When something interrupts the pattern (color, surprise, delight, nostalgia) perception widens. We encode more. The same room suddenly feels more alive. The same five minutes feel fuller. The same morning might feel slightly expanded.

Nothing about the kitchen changed, but the encoding did.

Nothing about the clock changed. But the experience did.

Maybe childhood wasn’t longer. Maybe it was more entangled with attention.

Maybe the multiverse isn’t just about alternate galaxies.

Maybe it’s about alternate ways of inhabiting the exact same moment?

Fruity Cereal Frenzy and the Return of Play

Fruity Cereal Frenzy first lived at conventions. It showed up as a mystery 4 oz surprise last December. And now, for one bright week, it’s back. Colorful, nostalgic, and slightly ridiculous in the best way.

Cereal boxes were part of the reason this company exists at all. When we built Merlin’s Munchies, we weren’t trying to out-caffeinate anyone. We were trying to recreate a feeling. We didn’t want coffee to just be caffeine. We wanted it to be an experience.  We wanted a visual pause, a playful interruption, and a reminder that mornings don’t have to feel compressed.

We wanted adults to sit down with a fresh cup and feel that tiny spark again.

Not childishness.

Childlike attention.

There’s a difference.

Childishness avoids responsibility. Childlike attention embraces the moment fully. It lingers. and notices, while allowing something small to feel slightly magical.

Children don’t rush through experience because they simply can’t. They are still discovering it. Their perception hasn’t yet been flattened by repetition. They look longer. They encode deeply and stay are open.

And that openness connects to something we’ve explored before.

In a previous Multiverse Monday piece, we talked about documented cases of children under four who reportedly remember past lives. (Read Here.)

These cases were studied by researchers like Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia. Whatever explanation you lean toward — spiritual, neurological, skeptical — one thing stands out: very young children access experience differently. Their perception isn’t yet filtered through decades of routine. Their sense of reality isn’t compressed.

They are open.

What if openness isn’t something we permanently lose?

What if it’s something we bury under schedules and repetition?

And what if slowing down peels back a layer?

Not because you’ve traveled to another dimension. But because you’ve chosen to inhabit this one more fully.

The Small Shift That Changes Everything

If there is such a thing as a multiverse, then small actions don’t just disappear. They compound into something else.

A smile instead of irritation. A breath instead of rushing. A pause instead of reflexively scrolling. These are tiny shifts on the surface, almost invisible. But they subtly change how you enter the next interaction. That changes how someone responds to you. Which changes how they enter their next interaction.

That is how branching happens.

What if it's not always always through exploding stars or splitting timelines, but through tone, perspective, energy, and attention?

Maybe the multiverse isn’t just infinite galaxies spinning beyond our sight. Maybe it’s infinite responses unfolding in the same room. Maybe it’s perspective widening in real time.

And maybe when you sit with a cup of Fruity Cereal Frenzy this week, glance at the label, smile for a second, and feel that flicker of Saturday morning energy, you’re not just being nostalgic. You’re widening perception. You’re encoding more of the moment. You’re choosing a slightly different branch of the exact same morning.

If children really are closer to some hidden layer of reality, (whether imagination, memory, or something stranger) then maybe the path back isn’t complicated.

What if it’s attention?

What if it’s play?

What if it’s allowing color and curiosity to interrupt routine?

So this week, in the spirit of Fruity Cereal Frenzy and Multiverse Monday, take a second. Sip slowly. Look at something joyful before you rush. Let the moment feel slightly larger than it needs to.

Maybe reality doesn’t always expand because the universe changes. Maybe sometimes it expands because you do!