Light from the other stars is there, as is some light refracting through the atmosphere (the sun isn't "gone", just on the other side of the planet), and the moon of course reflects sunlight.
Because when the different colors of light combine, it is perceived as "white"... that's how your eyes and brain work...
No, you can make someone temporarily blinded by overloading the retina... much like having a camera lens open too wide and thus washing out the picture (or sometimes even resulting in a pure-white exposure). Your brain does the "seeing" only insomuch as it is the seat of our consciousness - what you are describing is like trying to say that in a computer the monitor does the graphics - this is true only insomuch as it shows them to us, but the graphics card inside the tower does the actual processing.
Laser light is highly focused, whereas normal light is highly scattered. Thus, laser light refracts and scatters very minimally - however, if you did not see any "reflective rays", then you would not SEE the laser, period.
Case in point - take a standard red laser pointer, and point it at an object - you will see a red dot, but no beam. This is because the laser is not of a high enough magnitude/power to be seen through the air.
Now, take a high power green laser pointer, and point it at an object - you will see the beam, at least partway to the object. This is because of the higher magnitude/power, which causes the amount of light being reflected off the particles in the air to be a high enough magnitude to be visible to the human eye.
http://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...beams-visible-and-other-laser-beams-invisible