Abstract: The article is devoted to the consideration of some verbal phraseological units in which the semantic component of thought is performed by the subject of action. In such phraseological units, the thought is combined with such verbs as to return / to return, to be carried away / to be carried away, to flow, to sink / to fall. The article adopts a linguoculturological approach to the study of such phraseological units. In this article we understand phraseology, following V.N. Telia, as a unit characterized by stability, reproducibility, idiomaticity [Telia 1996: 56], when analyzing phraseological units, a linguoculturological approach to research and lexicographic description developed by V.N. Telia and other authors in the "Great Phraseological Dictionary of the Russian Language" is used [2017]. For our analysis, we have selected phraseological units that are represented in the National Corpus of the Russian Language (https://ruscorpora.ru/new /), including the abstract noun thought, which performs the function of the subject of action.Summing up, we can draw the following conclusions: 1) In the analyzed FE, thought independently performs various actions, moves freely in space, is beyond human control; 2) All the FE presented in this article, in general, correlate with the anthropic code of culture, and taking into account this opposition, with the spatial one. And all FE, taking into account the verbal components, still correlate with the activity code of culture. 3) The image of all FE is created by a metaphor that likens thought to a moving object or object that moves freely in space, does not depend on the will of an individual; 4) The metaphorically figurative basis of the units analyzed by us as a whole reflects a stereotypical idea of the process of mental activity beyond the control of a person.