The aunga is the Mekeo free-soul or spirit-double: the animate part of a person that leaves the body in sleep, dream and trance and journeys apart from it. This journeying underlies the spirit-travel of sorcerers and dreamers and is central to Michele Stephen's account of the Mekeo 'hidden self'. At death the aunga departs the body and takes its place among the tsiange, the ghosts of the dead. It is a category of animating spirit rather than a single named being, and different observers describe its relation to the ordinary waking self in different terms.