Walking down Grafton Street these days, I sometimes feel like that Polish railway worker who has just emerged from a long coma to find the world transformed.
In case you missed his story over the weekend, Jan Grzebski was hit by a train in 1988, when the communists were still in power. He remained unconscious as the Berlin Wall fell and throughout all the huge changes that swept Europe. But a loving wife (his own, luckily) nursed him slowly back to health. And now, like a Polish Rip Van Winkle, he has woken to a country changed beyond recognition.
Although the case sounds like a movie waiting to happen, it carries strong echoes of a film already made, in 2003. Goodbye Lenin! was a tragicomedy set in late-1980s East Berlin and concerned the efforts of a family to protect their mother - an ardent communist - from learning that the system has collapsed while she was comatose: a condition caused, poignantly, by a heart attack she suffered when seeing her son arrested in a pro-democracy demonstration.
Although it later emerges that her love for the East German socialist project was the result of temporary insanity following her husband's defection to the West years before, her children fear that the truth about the new dispensation will kill her.
So they construct an elaborate plan to keep the communist era alive in their apartment - dressing in drab clothes, putting new food in old jars, etc - while outside, the forces of Coca-Cola and Ikea take over the city. Of course, we and the children learn in the end that their father still lives locally. His defection was not to another political system but - worse - to another woman. It turns out that the mother was protecting her offspring from the truth, just as they were protecting her.
The film was one of the finer achievements of "Ostalgie", a phenomenon in which East Germans found themselves missing the good old days of oppression.
The big difference with the Polish railway worker's story is that he has no feelings of nostalgia for that era, only astonishment at what has replaced it. Before his coma, he explained, there was nothing in the grocery stores except "tea and vinegar". Meat was rationed, and there were long queues for petrol. "Now," as he said, "I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin".
The thing is, I know almost exactly how he feels. I'm fairly sure there was more than tea and vinegar in the shops of Dublin, even during the 1980s, but the increased range of goods on offer now is no less bewildering.
Meanwhile, it never ceases to amaze me that as recently as 15 years ago, we still managed to live without mobile phones. These days, as Jan Grzebski has noted, everybody in the street has one. And the really extraordinary thing is, even in Dublin, we nearly all seem to be Polish.
It is no surprise at all, however, to learn that Leaving Cert grades are much higher now than they were under communism.
Grade inflation has been rumoured here for years.
But according to yesterday's reports, the percentage achieving higher grades has soared in every major subject since 1989, with double digit growth rates in many.
The CAO points system is now almost as overvalued as the property market, it seems. At the risk of Ostalgie, I seem to remember a time when you could buy a reasonably good degree course in central Dublin - perhaps requiring some refurbishment - for under 300 points. Now, negative equity must be a problem for some Leaving Cert graduates, saddled as they are with reputations for great erudition but unable to make the payments. Despite the soaring grades, as one critic put it, a great many students "show remarkable deficiencies in literacy and numeracy".
I won't dwell here on the extent to which the lives of Leaving Cert cohorts prior to 1989 were blighted by the old communist grade system; although if there is a lawyer out there who thinks we could take a class action against the State, I'm prepared to dwell on it at length elsewhere.
In the meantime, I will take one of the points made by defenders of the new system, who explain the better grades in terms of the massively increased "social expectation of students".
That may be partly true. When I was doing the Leaving Cert, the concept of a Grade A was considered to be a bit like beach-front property.
There was a limited amount available and, especially if you lived in an inland county, you knew your chances of owning some were poor. But I'm not bitter.
Although we may not have done as well in our exams as we would today, and our job applications were correspondingly undermined, we were very lucky in one respect.
There were no jobs then anyway.
All that changed when the wall came down. And although the system that replaced the old one has its drawbacks, it is undoubtedly better.
I certainly wouldn't want to go back to where we were before those heady days of late 1989, when we all streamed through Checkpoint Charlie, wide-eyed with excitement, to begin a new life in the West.