This article traces Karen Gallas' experience as a teacher engaged in teacher research beginning in September of 1989 when she joined a weekly seminar in which teachers looked together at children's talk and while learning about methods of conducting classroom research on language. Gallas became very involved in what she now calls "Science Talks" (Gallas, 1995), and found her work with the seminar and with the Science Talks enabled herself and the children to carry on continuous dialogue about science. Three years after beginning her work on Science Talks, she had also become deeply involved in documenting the role of the arts in the classroom, studying children's work on community building in sharing time, and looking at the dynamics of gender and power in the classroom. As the children in her classroom gained greater control over forums like sharing time and science talk, her ability to teach and build a responsive curriculum with them also expanded. This gradually led her to research the ways in which children naturally used imagination to further their own learning. Eventually, that fascination led to important changes in her teaching (Gallas, 2003). In this article, Gallas focuses on the role of the unconscious mind in shaping research in each phase of the process: identifying the questions, developing a methodological framework, and analyzing the data. She illustrates her points by further unpacking different aspects of her own work.