When two things happen more or less simultaneously, are they necessarily always linked, or connected in any way?

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I pose this question, as my title, because sometimes we just assume, quite wrongly, that they must somehow be linked. For example, last night I was dreaming that I was in a hotel room shaving, and I was looking into the mirror to do this, when I noticed, with some surprise, that I had a lot of bruises, and scabs and scratchings on my forehead, where I had been bashed with a long waddy, or stick by some thug, earlier that day. Now, myself the dreamer, was surprised, that my dream body, had these cuts and abrasions on their head. Myself, the dreamer, did not know that my dream body had been bashed that morning, but my dream body did know this, of course, hence my, the dreamer's surprise, when I saw them in the mirror. I, my real self, woke up then, and I had a very bad headache in my physical body. What came first here then, the headache, or the dream? Did the headache create the dream around it, for example, or did the bashing in the dream, somehow create a real physical headache, in my real body, somehow? All is interconnected, but the originator of anything is never usually the one, or two things that we think it might be, in the first instance. Sometimes, things happening together like this have nothing to do with each other in reality. It might be neither the headache that created the dream, nor the dream that created the headache. They could be mutually independent events here, as the headache might have been being caused by my stress levels in my neck, and stomach, and the dream itself could have been caused by an agent of myself, such as my subconscious mind trying to show me that thinking too much gives me a headache, and whacking into myself ( all characters in a dream are usually a part of our own selves in some way. Here the basher is some part of myself bashing me, for example) feeling guilty about life, and its treatment of myself, injures my thinking, and so it is showing me that it is always a close shave for me to get out from those situations, back into the light of day. I need to stop hitting myself over the head, and getting down on myself. I need to cut back on my perfectionist stance, and cut myself some slack in my life sometimes, otherwise, I am just making my life into a painful headache for myself then, unnecessarily. Photo Credit: The photo used here was freely sourced from the free media site: pixabay.com. A close shave in a dream might mean just that, a close shave in your life.