The Riddle of the Birthday Non-Party

Chapter 3- Moving Bedtime to the Daytime

After exploring the house a bit, the four friends decided to doze off and celebrate Greg's birthday with him in his point of view.

They had their sleeping bags set up in the living room.  Phil even noticed that there were two couches and opened up the couch beds.  Thus, they placed their sleeping bags on the couch beds--everything fit perfectly.

They also took turns changing into their sleepwear.  They closed the window blinds, and Phil cleverly put on a slight darkness effect.

Thus they were almost ready to go to sleep... except for one problem.  None of them were sleepy.  At all.  Their eyes wouldn't stay closed for 10 seconds without feeling foolish.

"Oh geez," said Smiley, "this is one thing I never thought of..."

"Totally makes sense," replied Phred.

"Let's put our brains to the test," said Phil.  "What can we find in this room? ...maybe I should remove the darkness effect temporarily so we can search."

"There's... a fireplace, a fire, two sleepy pictures, a pot of closed flowers, and some bugspray," said Zack.  "But I don't see how any of that will help us."

"I found a tan gem!" said Smiley.  "Those things must be rare, so I'm impressed that a sleeping family managed to get a hold of it..."

"Maybe some satisfying music will help!" said Phil.  "Perhaps there's ASMR on the radio, and that's why the family is always sleeping."

"I guess we could give it a try," said Phred, shrugging.  He put on a random CD, but it was playing heavy metal music.

"I stand corrected..."

"Maybe we can open the window and hear the birds chirping."

"Phil..." said Smiley.  "There aren't any birds at this time of year.  They flew south.  Besides, we already closed the window blinds for a reason."

"Oh, right... I keep forgetting."

"One trick that always worked for me is counting sheep," said Zack.

"I... guess that's worth a shot.  But where are we going to find the sheep?"

"We don't need to!" replied Smiley.  "We can just imagine them."

So that's what the four friends did, after they got into their sleeping bags.

Phil closed his eyes and started to think, "One... two... three... four... gosh, how many friends does this sheep have!?"

Phred thought, "One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four Mississippi... wait, we're supposed to count sheep, not Mississippi's.  I just don't know how to count them right..."

Zack thought, "One... two... four... eight... sixteen... thirty-two..."  The flame on his head made him double the number of sheep at every second, thus making them grow rapidly.  He didn't know the dangers of exponential growth, until he reached 4,294,967,296.  (That's 2^32, by the way.)  By that time, there were too many sheep in his mind.

But Smiley just kept counting to herself.  Eventually, she reached 851, but didn't bother counting any more because she was fast asleep.  Phred heard her snores and naturally fell asleep to them.  Zack magically confirmed that despite there being over four billion sheep in his mind, every single one of them was sleeping soundly.  Thus he fell asleep as well.

Finally, Phil thought about using the creature communicator on some of the sheep.  When he did that, the sheep wished him sweet dreams, enabling him to fall asleep as well.

It was perfect.  They didn't even need anything in the room.