How startling to be awakened in the middle of the night by moonlight streaming through an uncurtained window. It is almost a metaphor for enlightenment, especially when beginning in a dream no longer remembered. What is best remembered is the profound silence.
Two non-verbal attempts to capture moonlight: Debussy’s familiar piano piece, Clair de lune, and Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (indeed, any number of his paintings). (I don’t know enough about Chirico to know if moonlight is portrayed but certainly night is.) Both of these works are “surreal” in that we never really experience moonlight, only the feelings within us evoked by it. Yet these feelings, evoked in a living being by an inanimate object, are (if it does not sound pompous) intimations of the mysteries of consciousness.