I'm a firm believer that dreams have absolutely no secondary meaning (so throw away those books analysis books, you ABers, if you dream about the colour red, it doesn't have a subliminal meaning!) and that they are merely a jumbled up interpretation of stuff going round in your conscious and unconscious on a day to day basis.
Just as you have nightmares as a child that make no sense and scare the hell out of you, as an adult, dreams can be scary and bear no relation to your real life. you might well have been thinking about your dad (what with Christmas coming up and seeing your family etc) and this has just got jumbled with what's really going on in your life.
Without being flippant, I frequently dream that I have a dog or (even more worryingly!, a baby!) even though I have neither. It's probably just that during the day I've seen a dog in the street or a baby in a pushchair in a shop and my brain remembers that, stores it in my brain and throws it up in a random lottery while I sleep.
I know it's freaky when it happens to the extreme that you've experienced, but there's nothing dark about it or anything to be worried about. It's just your daft old brain running through info and getting everything mixed up when you're trying to get some much-needed sleep.
Please don't worry - you're not the first, or the last, to have had such a dream, and it's absolutely nothing to worry about.
(PS I've got a degree in psychology, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the brain is still not fully charted and does things that we don't expect from time to time)