Is light better thought as illumination- or revelation?

The question captivating me to day is this: How do ideas relate to light-- they both enable us to see don't they? Maybe, light isn't illuminating as much as it's revealing?

The thought experiment.

Imagine yourself in a darkened room where nothing is visible. No worries though, you have a flashlight. You turn it on and point the beam around to illuminate objects in order to get your bearings. A couch; an ottoman; framed prints; carpet; you deduce that you're in a living room. What ever you pointed your flashlight at, you awashed that object in light and once so illuminated, you could see it; everything else remained invisible.

Now imagine yourself on your driveway on a bright and early Saturday morning equipped with bucket, sponge and soap, and water hose and sprayer. This Saturday you begin your to-do list by washing your car.

Where these two scenarios have similarity is in "awashing," and the pointing of a delivery system. While the hose system is delivering water and the flashlight, light-energy, in either case we feel ourselves to be flooding an object with something delivered from a tool in our hand.

Here's the key difference: any resulting splash back from the jet of water hitting the car and we're likely to get wet (unless your reflexes are quick). Without an ensuing "splash back" from our washing the ottoman in light, we don't see it. Washing with water, the splash back is superfluous. Washing with light, the splash back is mandatory if we are to see a thing-- that is, for a thing to be visible rather than invisible.

It's this mandatory splash back of photons entering our brain system through our pupils and causing visibility where I'm seeing that light doesn't so much illuminate a thing as much as it reveals a thing. Light doesn't wash an object the way water does. Instead, light interacts at an atomic level with that object in a way that purposely makes enough of a splash back to travel through pupils and reach a brain that can translate those "droplets" into the ottoman and couch on which we can lean back and lounge with our feet up.

I might be splitting hairs except for this: It's not the photon itself that makes something visible; rather, it's that a photon "splashed back" from the ottoman or the car newly cleaned and shiny; before a photon can make an image in your brain, it must first have been in an entangled relation with that object. With out such relation, a photon can only be seen as a flash of light that doesn't reveal anything.