Ahn Hee-yeon Loses Sleep After a Nightmare of Crying with a Baby in Her Arms in ‘Love on the Menu’

Actress Ahn Hee-yeon is portraying the inner life of a character consumed by profound sorrow and a sense of loss. As the KBS drama ‘Love on the Menu’ follows its characters gathering the fragments of a broken family and turning them into a warm, sustaining life together, the psychological anguish confronting Ahn’s character is adding further tension to the story.

A memory of loss manifested as a nightmare

Ahn reveals her character’s trauma through a scene in which she wakes from a nightmare after wailing with a baby in her arms. The anguished cry, “Let Mom hold you just once, Gyeol,” conveys the depth of the psychological pain the character is enduring. Her dream of holding the baby and weeping expresses more than immediate sadness. It symbolically evokes the emotional weight of a past event or a relationship between the characters that has been severed.

The sequence gives visible form to the character’s unstable psychological state. Even after she wakes, the nightmare leaves behind an afterimage that does not readily fade. That lingering distress suggests that Ahn’s character is not merely grieving; she is also locked in an intense struggle with unresolved fragments of her past.

Within the drama’s broader focus on restoring a family, those unhealed memories can be understood as a central challenge that the character must overcome. The nightmare makes that conflict immediate by bringing her loss into the present, while her tears expose how deeply the past continues to shape her emotional life.

A narrative device pointing toward the rebuilding of a family

‘Love on the Menu’ tells the story of a man and a woman who collect the scattered pieces of a broken family and prepare what the drama describes as the warmest table of life in the world. Starring Ha Seok-jin, Ahn Hee-yeon, Park Yoo-na and Bae Jung-nam, the series examines how people who have experienced loss fill the empty spaces in one another’s lives and find the strength to stand again.

Ahn’s precarious emotional arc appears to signal that this process of rebuilding will be anything but smooth. Her character’s grief is not treated as something that can simply be left behind. Instead, the nightmare and its lingering effects show how the damage of the past remains present even as the characters move toward recovering the bonds of family.

Ultimately, the nightmare and tears confronting Ahn’s character reveal what is missing within her while also laying the narrative groundwork for the restoration of familial love in the story ahead. As the wounded characters gather their own fragments in different ways, the emotional changes shown by Ahn’s character are expected to form a central axis of the drama.