Author Peter Doggett describes "I'm Only Sleeping" as "Half acid dream, half latent Lennon laziness personified." As with "Rain", the basic track was recorded at a faster tempo before being subjected to varispeeding. The latter treatment, along with ADT, was also applied to Lennon's vocal as he sought to replicate, in MacDonald's description, a "papery old man's voice". For the guitar solo, Harrison recorded two separate lines: the first with a clean sound, while on the second, he played his Gibson SG through a fuzzbox. Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould views the solo as appearing to "suspend the laws of time and motion to simulate the half-coherence of the state between wakefulness and sleep". Musicologist Walter Everett likens the song to a "particularly expressive text painting".