For a brief moment it feels as if you’re floating in air before jerking awake, reports Today.
“It is sort of a rough transition,” Dr. W. Christopher Winter, a sleep medicine doctor at Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine in Virginia, told TODAY. “Hypnic jerks are happening because it is sort of a transitional period in your brain from being awake and having control of your body and its movements and … transitioning to sleep.”
