Rip Van Winkle was a character in a short story by the American writer Washington Irving.
In the story,Rip lived in a little town in the Hudson Valley, in New York, in the 1770s, around the time of the American Revolution. Rip went out hunting one day, took a nap under a tree, and feel asleep. He woke up 20 years later to find himself a citizen of a brand-new country the United States of America.
Similarly, in the movie Goodbye Lenin, Kathrin Sass, an East German woman, who dedicated her life to the perpetuation of Communist Party ideology, slip into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she wakes up eight months laters, she is a member of a capitalist society. While she has been "asleeps," governments have tumbled, barriers have fallen, and a whole new tide of Western goods and values has come flooding eastwand to an eagerly awaiting public. Her loving son, Alex, fears that the shock of finding such as a radically changed plan to protect her form the truth and to make her believe that the world she lives in now is the same as it used to be.