Beheading in a dream: what does it mean?
A dream that alarms people badly and which very rarely means what they fear, though it is worth saying that plainly rather than leaving it vague.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
Freud
Freud read the loss of a head or a limb in a narrow and specific way, and it is fair to record that he would apply it here. A reader is entitled to know that was his position and entitled to find it unpersuasive.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would more likely separate the head as the seat of thinking from the body that carries on without it, and would ask whether the dreamer has been living at a distance from their own reasoning.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Violent dream imagery is common and is not evidence of violent intent, toward oneself or anybody else. Dreams of harm occur in people with no wish to cause any, and the content of a dream is not a plan. If dreams of death or harm are frequent, distressing, or arriving alongside low mood, that is worth raising with a doctor, and it is a reasonable thing to bring up.
Our summary of the threat-simulation position. See Revonsuo, The reinterpretation of dreams (2000).Mythological
Execution by beheading was for centuries the death reserved for the nobility, on the reasoning that it was quicker and therefore a privilege, and a great deal of European ritual and imagery grew up around that distinction. Much of what a modern dreamer has absorbed arrives through that historical staging rather than through anything personal.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
In literature
The historical material is heavily worked and the fresh ground is almost always procedural: who was paid, who cleaned up, who had to be present by law.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
The separation of the thinking part from the part that carries on.
Genre conventions
Tudor scaffolds, revolutions, and a crowd written as a single animal.
How to subvert it
Write the crowd as individuals, one of whom is there by accident.
Try this
Two hundred words from somebody in the third row who did not want to come.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.