The best way to listen to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is to be so absorbed in the verse and the mysterious, swirly parkscape it presents that you fail to anticipate what's happening next, so that the metaphysical departure of the chorus is experienced not as an inevitable part of the song's structure but as a spontaneous and extremely lucky accident. Of course, you can't will yourself to hear the chorus this way, any more than you can throw a surprise party for yourself; it just sneaks up on you sometimes. But here's something you can do on purpose: try to hear each of the three performances of the chorus as distinct event with a unique interpretation of time. I'm pretty sure the second one is the slowest and heaviest. Moreover, each chorus seems to be deeply rhythmically undecided within itself; maybe it's an epiphenomenon of the flanging, but it seems to me if you follow the drums you can hear it like a hip-hop recording where the sampled drumbeat not only understands something different about 16th notes but is oddly matched to the song's primary tempo, speeding up over the course of the bar and synchronizing again on the downbeat. Such effects are more evident on the mono mix, which, because slower, does less to blur anomalies of time, as pounded out by animals, into the evenly divided continuum of geometry.