What's the importance of the Chief's dream in CH 7?

Chief Bromden’s dream in Chapter Seven presents his fear that all the men in the ward are turning into mechanized vegetables, losing their capacity to feel, to live, and ultimately to rediscover their own souls. Rather than helping them, their stay at the hospital is slowly obliterating everything inside of them and replacing it with machine-like deadness. At the same time, the Chief still seems unreliable as a narrator in that he is apt to completely lose track of reality at the slightest trigger. He normally does not dream because of the pills that plunge him into heavy slumbers. Now, however, with the opportunity to dream, his subconscious is unleashed, and while this nightmare is not so different from those of sane people, his reaction suggests that he is in another fog. Perhaps he senses that he has reached a critical point where he either must fight back to lucidity or surrender to the fate of Blastic.