moonbeam

noun

1. A ray or shaft of moonlight.

   “Holonym: moonlight”

   “A moonbeam pierced the heavy cloud!”

   “Quickly the moon sent a moonbeam down, and it shone through the window, right on the face of the sleeping child, kissed him, and gave him a pleasant dream.”

   “The mountain flanked on the east by Devil's Peak and glancing to the right Lion's Head and Signal Hill shimmers and the residents at the foot of the mountain bask in the splendour of moonbeams.”

2. Any of various Australasian lycaenid butterflies of the genus Philiris.
3. Someone who tends to be dreamy and prone to unrealistic romanticism.

   “While you're responding to the dithering confusing Lynda is causing in the bus depot, you're absorbing the emotions between mother and child. Darcy is often very grownup around her mother, as if she knew that Lynda is a bit of a moonbeam and needs looking after.”

   “Dreaming of the mountain was for moonbeams, he told me, not for people who had been born up there.”

   “You really are a moonbeam. The way I remember it, most of the shouting and protesting was coming from young guys who had college deferments and were worried what would happen when they got out of school and the deferment ran out and they couldn't get a job teaching in a ghetto school so they could get another deferment.”

   “You are such a moonbeam. Now come here and kiss me.”

4. A goal or aspiration that appears attractive but is ultimately insubstantial.

   “So much for moonbeams and politics.”

   “So the idea of Common Cause and other reform advacates that government corruption can be ended by public financing of election campaigns is just another silly moonbeam.”

   “It did not take long to realize that the dozens of missions we were running all over southern Iraq were really nothing more than an occasionally dangerous hunt for moonbeams, and that the British mission as a whole was losing its way.”