When retrieving a LAZY association property and attempting to downcast the returned entity, a ClassCastException is raised due to the use of the javassist proxy (even if the proxy is initialized). The proxy must be "unwrapped" to downcast using something like the below.

(( org.hibernate.proxy.HibernateProxy) entity).getHibernateLazyInitializer().getImplementation();

It would be useful to provide something like an org.hibernate.Hibernate.unproxy(Object proxy) method rather than requiring users to access the proxy interface as above.