Gwo bonanj and ti bonanj

The two soul parts in Vodou: the big good angel that travels in sleep, and the little good angel, the conscience.

According to Haitian Vodou a person consists not only of a body, but also of several spiritual parts. The two best known are the gwo bonanj and the ti bonanj, in French gros bon ange and ti bon ange: the big good angel and the little good angel.

The gwo bonanj is the life force and consciousness: the part that thinks, feels, remembers and gives a person their personality. The ti bonanj resembles conscience more: the part that watches over what someone does, and that after death testifies to how someone lived. People also speak of the mèt tèt, the lwa who is master of a person's head.

For dreams the gwo bonanj is the most important concept. During sleep it is said to be able to leave the body and travel. What you dream is, in that view, sometimes what the gwo bonanj experiences along the way: meetings with the living who are far away, with ancestors or with lwa. That is why dreams in Vodou are taken seriously as possible real experience.

After death, according to tradition, the gwo bonanj stays for a time beneath the water, lanvè dlo, and after a year and a day is brought back with a ceremony, so that the deceased can become an ancestor who supports the family. Dreams about deceased people in water are sometimes connected with that passage.

Because the gwo bonanj is said to travel in sleep, some practitioners say you should not wake someone who is deeply asleep and dreaming roughly.

Dreamkin describes these concepts as a way of looking, not as a statement about what happens to anyone's soul.