How events are connected in dreams

One tendency I've observed in my dreams is that events that happen at the beginning of the dream tend to have some role to play later on, when I've already put them out of my thoughts.

For example a really long dream I had began with me entering a virtual reality, I thought i had left it but later I found out I was still in it, and this surprised me because I really wasn't thinking about that at all. Did my subconscious create a plot twist all by itself?

I always though dreams were more like unconnected events, but this has happened in many of my dreams. Has this happened to you often?

Absolutely. One great example is a dream I had a few years ago:

My mom, her b/f and I had almost gotten into a car accident, and since it was raining we pulled over at a little sandwich shop to clear our heads. While I was at the shop, I met a guy who told me a ghost story. While he was telling me the story, two guys walked into the shop - one dressed as Jesus, the other as the Devil.

So, the guy tells me this entire ghost story (which is very long) and he finally gets to the twist, which is that I am actually the ghost in the story. He tells me that I died, some time ago, and my ghost always comes back to this sandwich shop, around the same time. Other people were coming by our table, and acting like I wasn't even there, because apparently they couldn't see me. Then the guys dressed as Jesus and the Devil walked back out of the shop, staring at me as they passed. Then it hit me: Those guys could actually see me, and so could the guy I had been talking to. When I turned back to the guy, he had disappeared - also a ghost, and apparently Jesus and the Devil were the real thing, and they were just scoping me out.

It was just amazing how my brain took the two of them walking into the shop, randomly, completely ignored them, throughout the time the man was telling me the entire ghost story, and then turned around to actually tie them into the story, much later in the dream.

As far as how dreams flow, I don't believe they are unconnected at all. Basically, the thought process works through schemas, which are singular concepts stored in your mind to help you communicate with people, in context. So, when someone says to you the word "baseball," it (undetectably) activates schemas in your mind which relate to baseball, so you can be prepared to use them in context, and better relate to the conversation.

Concepts like: round, diamond, laces, teams, stadium, umpire, bases, field, grass, crowd, beer, popcorn, bat, glove, etc.

I believe that this is how dreams work, as well. If a concept is in your mind like baseball, and you dream about a baseball field, the dream might then transition into a mafia scenario, where some guy is getting beat up with a bat, and that might then turn into a video game, because the concept of "Mafia" makes you think about the game of the same name (even if you're not trying to). And things just continue to flow along like that, according to associations that you may not even be able to detect, consciously.