Disturbing murder dream, Please help!

I hope you can help me interpret this dream. This is a very graphic and disturbing dream so if you are bothered by gore please do not read on...A little background first. I am 41 years old. Divorced one year ago. I remarried and have two boys, 11 and 13 years old, from my first marriage. My new wife is having a hard time with the boys as any step parent does. We are also have had discussions about people who she is talking to that I don't like her talking to, namely, other guys that she has had relationships with in the past. I also have an old girlfriend, or fling rather, who is still wanting to be friends or more than friends with me. This is causing me stress because I don't want to be in another unfaithful relationship. I love my new wife dearly and would do anything for her.

I am also having a rough time with my ex who is continuing to treat my boys bad and putting herself ahead of the boys. My new wife is wanting me to take her back to court and get full custody of the boys.

I also have a boss that is having a fling with a married co-worker and I have to deal with listening to him about that all the time and dealing with a stressful job as it is, and having to deal with all the problems associated with him having an affair with a co-worker, unfair practices to other co-workers, policy changes while dealing with his lover etc... Then this last week was a busy week for us at work and a quite stressful one.

I would consider myself an atheist so one part of the dream is interesting to me.

Aside from that, I have just now begun to explore Buddhism and am beginning to learn about myself things that I never knew before or didn't want to acknowledge. That is a lot of stuff on my plate...Put all that together and I get this dream last night. I actually had several weird dreams but I don't remember them, only this one.

Start of the dream...
Things that I didn't see in the dream but I knew. My oldest son and I were in the mafia, and we were out in a field at a ranch I grew up on with another nameless, faceless guy we were going to kill.
So the dream opens with this guy kneeling on the ground in front of an old 1930's sedan that was black with chrome. My son and I were wearing black suits with black shiny shoes and gangster style hats, with white shirts. He was holding a modern style machine gun like an M16. He looks as the guy then turns to me and sweeps me at waist, and upper leg level with the machine gun and then turns to the other guy and shoots him. I react by breaking his neck. He then turns to me and tells me that he is OK. And that the reason he shot me first is because he thought that I had done this type of thing before. Then I reach up and tip his head forward and it is severed except some skin and he is dead. But there is no blood. I tip his head back and he says he is OK again and he is happy but concerned. I tip his head forward again and he says he is dying, and that he is going to heaven. I think to myself about the "experiment" that happened centuries ago with the scientist who wanted to see how long you live after you were decapitated and the talked the guy on the guillotine to blink as long as he could after the decapitation and I thought that he could still be alive. But think that it is strange that he can talk without being connected to his lungs. (I do have a medical background) My son said that he saw gold streets in heaven. I asked him if he could see God and he didn't answer.

That was the end of the dream.

Very disturbing dream, I would never harm my son or anyone else and I have never had a dream like this before. I don't really want to talk to anyone I know about this because it is so disturbing. Please help me make sense of this.

First of all, yes, this is a very disturbing dream. However, keep in mind that dreams often exaggerate and you do not have your waking inhibitions and moral values etc available to you in most dreams. Since you are going through a stressful time in your life, stressful and disturbing dreams become more likely.

One very useful tool in dream interpretation is to look at all of the dream characters as aspects of yourself. So if you look at it that way, your son in this dream may not represent your son, but rather an aspect of yourself. So in this dream perhaps you did not kill your son so much as killing the more innocent aspect of yourself, the part of you that is willing to believe that all is going to be ok, the part of you that has faith. The part of you that did the killing is approaching things more analytically like an experiment without emotion. It could be that this dream is saying that you have killed off the part of you that thinks everything is going to be ok, and now the part of you that is left is too analytical and not emotional enough. In your dream in fact you are dangerously close to being a sociopath. Now that's where the initial disclaimer that dreams exaggerate comes in: of course you are not a sociopath in waking life - your waking thought is to be appalled by this dream, and knowing that you would never harm your son. Perhaps this dream is just a warning that you need to make sure to balance your emotions such as love with your analytical side, and be sure to let the emotion of love drive your actions, and don't give up on the "innocent" ideals such as "everything is going to be ok." Hope is needed in waking life and in dream life. In dreams, expectations often or usually determine what happens, and perhaps your expectations are too pessimistic and hopeless right now. In waking life luckily expectations do not determine what happens usually, however even in waking life if one does not have enough hope and optimism, things are much more likely to come out worse or at least appear worse.

I hope this helps. If not, feel free to discard, and search for another explanation.

It's interesting that you mention the analytical side. In the dream I remember analyzing things, like that he shouldn't be able to talk. That struck me as odd. Some things that may be driving that. The guy that I work with over analyzes everything, and I catch myself doing that as well. My wife came out of a relationship where her boyfriend over analyzed everything. And I find myself doing the same.
I have also given up religion because the analytical side of me says that it's all horse feathers. And I have no desire to go back to organized religion. However, perhaps that is the draw to Buddhism in that there are no God's or prophets to follow that have ridiculous things we are to believe. But rather Buddha was a man, was not a god, and didn't expect or ask people to follow him, but rather he taught people how to find their own path. Maybe that's the spiritual path that I am telling myself I should follow.

Very interesting thoughts, and I thank you. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else chimes in.