It came to me in the night. What Lewiston needs is a dome over it, a big overturned clear-glass bowl that separates us from our neighbors.

Think of it: no more riffraff coming in from Greene and Turner. No more Auburnites sneaking over in their kayaks and hot air balloons.

With the crack pipeline choked off forever, Lewiston addicts can get well. Free of the noxious substance that corrupted their minds, they might go on to become opera stars, architects, ballerinas, flautists. Lewiston could undergo the kind of Renaissance not seen since 15th century Italy, all thanks to the mysterious bowl thing that fell from outer space, or whatever.

We could finally break our Walmart dependence. BONK! That’s the sound of your face striking the dome as you try to make a late-night run across the Vet’s Bridge. It will sting a little at first, but you won’t need the superstore once we revive the Lewiston mills and start our own exotic gardens atop their roofs. Imagine Lewiston as a self-sufficient autonomy, uncontaminated by the trappings of the outside world.

No more damn snow, either. Auburn, Lisbon and Sabattus might get 3 feet of the crap, but in Domeville, it’s greenhouse summer all year long. We will sun ourselves on the beaches along the canals. We will prance topless, thumbing our noses or pressing our bare buttocks against the glass to taunt our freezing former-neighbors on the other side of the Androscoggin.

I tell you, it will be sweet. I don’t know where I come up with these ideas. I might be some kind of genius.

Or maybe this is just my way of sneaking in a review of the hot new TV series “Under the Dome,” a string of episodes so gripping, I tune in each week just so I can crab about it and ruin the series for everyone else.

No, lads, I’m not a fan of this summertime offering and it’s probably because I enjoyed the novel so much. In Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” the good guys were very good and the bad guys …

Well, you see where I’m going with this. In the book, you had Big Jim Reny, a megalomaniac so detestable, I punched, head-butted and drop-kicked the novel several times while I was reading it. It hurt. It’s a big book.

King’s Big Jim Reny was the most odious character I’ve ever come across, a town selectman with a Messiah complex aggravated by the dome. I mean, I seethed while I read that book, hoping with every page that Big Jim Reny would come to the most painful end possible. That was fun for me.

In the TV movie, Reny is a bad guy, but not really. He’s sort of good, too, earnestly trying to help the town instead of simply fueling his own power trip as he does in the book. Plus, when TV Reny sneers, he looks a lot like Jack Nicholson and how can you not dig that?

In the book, Reny’s kid is a completely unrepentant madman, keeping time with a pair of dead girls and making you wish the dome had split him in half when it came crashing down.

In the movie, the kid is a doe-eyed pretty boy with feathered hair who probably writes poetry in his spare time. You can’t help but feel sorry for the lad, even as he’s shooting someone in the face or chaining a girl in a fallout shelter. Poor Junior. He’s just misunderstood.

Stephen King’s protagonist, a man named Barbie, was my favorite good guy since Stu Redman. He’s an army vet, a short-order cook and a fellow who only wants to slip under the dome and go on his way. Stephen King’s Barbie could kill you with a rubber band and a Pez dispenser, but he wouldn’t because he’s an honest-to-God nice guy living by the “harm no one” philosophy.

In the movie, Barbie is a hired goon who has killed a guy before the opening credits have even stopped rolling. In the very first scene, we see him pulling a gun out of the glove compartment when he sees a pair of cops coming his way.

That’s not the Barbie I know and love. Is he good? Is he bad? A half dozen episodes in, we still don’t know.

Stephen King’s Chester’s Mills is pure small town Maine as only King can do it. To me, it felt like Turner, or possibly Lisbon, with characters so shrewdly drawn, I swear I recognized a few of them at the Moxie Festival.

The TV version of Chester’s Mills feels like Hollywood, with characters that are overly pretty and too slick to feel familiar. When they speak, they don’t sound like men and women chatting among the tomatoes at Blackie’s, as they do in the novel. They sound like actors and actresses reading lines written by a guy who PRESUMES what Maine people sound like.

What bugs me the most – and I have to hit pause 10 times per episode to emphasize this – is that it’s needless. Some Hollywood guy presumably bought the rights to King’s novel, earning the right to do with it whatever he pleased. He didn’t need to do very much – the dialogue was perfection. The characters were brilliantly drawn.

King gives you the funniest pair of lunatics ever — a crazy meth cooker named Chef teamed with a town selectman gone off the deep end — and you write them right out of the script?

Absurd. Ridiculous. Needless tinkering, is what it is. Introducing that annoying duality to every single character has made me stop caring about any of them. (I admit that I peed a little when the kid rose up out of his seizure to give the hush sign to the cameras. But I didn’t really care, you see.)

I’ll complain about these matters as long as the series is airing, but I’m also tuning in each week to watch so who’s the chump here, anyway?

By the way, if you enjoy watching a movie with someone who does nothing but complain for the full hour, whip up some popcorn and invite me over.

Unless you live outside of Lewiston, that is.

BONK!

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