If you open a dialog in Swing, for example a JFileChooser, it goes somewhat like this pseudocode:

swing event thread {
  create dialog
  add listener to dialog close event {
    returnValue = somethingFromDialog
  }
  show dialog
  (wait until it is closed)
  return returnValue
}

My question is: how can this possibly work? As you can see the thread waits to return until the dialog is closed. This means the Swing event thread is blocked. Yet, one can interact with the dialog, which AFAIK requires this thread to run.

So how does that work?