You live in Belfast, Rockland or one of those charming little towns in between. You fall asleep one night in the region commonly known as Midcoast. You wake up the next morning and you’re somewhere else.

A warp in the time/space continuum? Mischievious space aliens? The Trilateral Commission?

You should be so lucky. It’s a force far more devious and dark. It’s Bath/Brunswick/Topsham business interests and Portland consultants, a nefarious cabal that is in the process of copyrighting the appelation “Maine’s Midcoast.”

It started innocently enough as a project to give this cluster of fine communities a marketable identity for attracting new businesses and more tourists. Under the auspices of the Mid-Coast Council for Business Development (MCBD), consultant John Spritz and his partner, Pennisi & Co., were hired, $50,000 was spent and a plan was hatched.

It’s a beaut; a bold, paradigm-shifting, quantum leap in how to promote something — advertise. Ta-da. OK, so folks on the boards of local chambers of commerce might say they’ve been urging that for years. But they work for free. They didn’t cost $50,000. They don’t count.

Besides, they didn’t produce a logo. And a wicked good logo it is. It shouts “MAINE’S MID-COAST.” A pair of seagulls on the wing forms the hyphen. The sun makes the “O” in coast; the “A” is a stylized representation of a sloop under sail. Who, suddenly coming into possession of such a splendid logo, would not want to protect it from unauthorized use? Naturally, steps were taken to get a trademark on it.

Then things got wierd. The consultants started talking about how, through copyrighting the actual phrase “Maine’s Midcoast,” the region could become the one Official Midcoast. Local officials have jumped on the “Official” bandwagon, talking about how the colloquial phrase is now their property.

Scott Benson of MCBD is an upbeat fellow who sounds a bit harried these days. While offering assurances that no one intends to cause harm or alarm, he concedes that a local paper’s editorial, which listed a selection of Rockland-area Midcoast-named businesses and hinted there may be legal questions, was the journalistic equivalent of dousing a grease fire with gasoline. He says the primary goal is to copyright the logo, but concedes there is local interest in “exploring the fuzzy ownership” of the phrase itself.

Explore away, Maine’s Official Midcoast. Meanwhile, other uncopyrighted regions might want to do some digging. According to the phone book, there are 25 businesses using the term “Down East” in the Bath/Brunswick area, an area about as Down East as Omaha. From Ellsworth to Calais, wheels already are in motion.

Being a magnanimous lot, folks in Pseudo Midcoast likely aren’t as concerned about themselves as they are about the citizens of Official Midcoast, who got billed $50,000 for this. Fear not; it’s a federal grant, thus for a mere .0002 cents per American, it has been confirmed that there is, as long suspected, a federal Program to Pay Consultants to Reach Obvious Conclusions and to Stir up Unnecessary Trouble. At least that’s Official.