Kiss This Fish.

TRUE STORY: Sunday night, I dreamed that I was hanging out at a house with a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a long time.

At some point someone mentioned a movie called “Kiss This Fish.” I’d never heard of it. A female friend said, “OMG, you never heard of ‘Kiss This Fish’? It’s the best movie ever!”

I learned that “Kiss This Fish” was a romantic comedy-drama about a man and a woman who discovered they could telepathically share their thoughts and feelings whenever they were in the same room with a certain magical tropical fish which lived in a fishbowl aquarium. This telepathic connection facilitated their falling in love and sharing incredible intimacy.

I learned that every woman on the planet loved this movie and it was the best romantic movie ever made.

Then I woke up. I had to Google “Kiss This Fish” in case it was a real movie that I’d heard of somewhere. As far as I can tell, it is not.

I’m not sure where this came from, but it was probably influenced by “Mindbridge,” a 1970s experimental science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. I read this back in the late 1970s and recently acquired it again, though I haven’t reread it yet. In this book, space explorers on planet Groombridge Something find a semi-sessile aquatic animal that, as I recall, resembles a cross between a slug and a sponge. They find that if two people touch it at the same time, they can communicate with each other telepathically. (The animal itself is mindless and has no thoughts. It’s just a means of connection.)

The book is not a romance, although there is a romantic relationship in it, and of course at one point the couple try having sex while touching the animal, so there is a telepathic sex scene, described via the thoughts and sensations that each person is having at the time.