@ Professor Frederick Coolidge: I found your hypothesis of the hypnic jerk to be very intriguing and it makes sense to look for an evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon. Yet I had always assumed another hypothesis.

There are a couple chemicals that the brain doses out to our bodies during REM sleep to keep us from acting out our dreams. These chemicals basically paralyze our bodies. The hypnic jerk occurs right at the edge of slumber before our body is fully paralyzed. The act of "falling asleep" is aptly named. We feel like we are falling as we enter sleep. This feeling is coupled with a dream state that parallels it. We feel like we are falling so we dream that we are falling. Our instinctual reaction to falling is to react; To catch ourselves. And so in the process of catching ourselves falling in the dream, our yet-to-be-paralyzed bodies jump and wake us up. There's your hypnic jerk.

Any ideas which Laurie Anderson song that was? I wish they'd list the musical clips!

The Suzanne Vega version of "Wake Up" comes from a Disney tribute album of the same name, which also includes a perfectly casted version of "When You Wish Upon a Star" featuring Ringo Starr.

When falling into a black hole, your body would snap and continue to function physiologically, to some degree, for a few moments,

However, any body will lose consciousness at accelerations much less than that which would overcome the electromagnetic forces holding your flesh together. Your brain does not function when all the fluid in it is being pulled to one side. Pilots and astronauts have set some g records, and they all fainted long before anything went to pieces.

Mr Scientist just went for the ratings and made it sound like some kind of torture, even though your ability to sense physical pain would go under long before any separation of flesh.

@Ian Carey
That version is by Suzanne Vega. I can't seem to find it on iTunes, however.

Did anybody else think about Inception while listening to the part about the hypnic jerk?

Whose version of "Stay Awake" is that?

To go with falling to pieces in a black hole. When your body speeds up ie; approaches the speed of light, time slows down to you; but, not to everything else; so, the pain that you experence lasts forever.

I wonder, would one experience a stronger hypnic jerk if they were both falling asleep and falling in love? Or if one went skiing for the first time earlier that day? The idea being that greater activation of the idea of "falling" in the brain would add up to a stronger sensation for the hypnic jerk.