So last night I took a trip for the 4th of July down to Key West in a 182. I've made this trip at least 5 times before so I'm not really new to it, but this was 1 of only a couple of times when we planned to return at night. We departed runway 9 straight out and planned to over-fly Marathon before turning North towards Fort Lauderdale. I'm an instrument rated pilot but what happened next still spooked me a bit. As we're climbing out I start to realize just how dark of a night it is. This was a really eiree feeling, I was on top of a broken cloud layor and as I approached my selected cruise altitude of 5500 ft I realized there was absoluty no horizon, and no moon. I was VFR, but actually IMC. I had no reference to the horizon whatsoever and I could barely make out dark clouds ahead of me but I couldn't see enough to know if I was at thier level, above them, or below them. I had checked the weather before I left and it was reported to be pretty good, with a chance of an isolated thunderstorm. In my experience these are pretty easy to avoid at night, as you can see them lighting up from 50 miles away. But these were just clouds. Then bam out of nowhere I was in the soup. The strobes flashed brightly against the clouds creating a strobostophic effect on the prop which was very distracting. I immediatly shut them off and was being bounced around in moderate turbulance. The airspeed went from 130 to 145 in an instant, and I reduced power and thought about the situation. I started a decent and was out of the cloud in about a minute or so but it just caught me by complete surpise. Its one thing to file IFR and just not pay attention to exactly when you'll be in and out of cloud, but its quite another to be VFR and try to avoid clouds on a night when its IMMPOSSIBLE TO SEE THEM!!