Hi Outsidecreative,
Your question has caused me to stop and think about it, and I find there are two parts to it that make a difference, at least in my experience.
"Retrievals" covers at least two types of experience that I've had -- One, when we seek to help locate temporarily lost souls who are unknown to us, and another, when we go out seeking a deceased person on behalf of some other person.
The first might happen as a result of a disaster like a tsunami, for example, or we just offer ourselves to the general retrieval process and see who shows up. In these cases I mostly sense information in order to find them. When I've made some contact I might ask them abit about themselves in order to find a suggestion of who they will meet in the afterlife, in order to encourage them to go there. That information is still basically "sensed" without much conscious sensory input.
However if I went on a retrieval to find someone specific due to someone else's specific request (which I no longer do,)
I'll get a visual impression of the person and slightly hear them, at least some cadence of their speech patterns. The clarity of these impressions usually isn't very strong for me but is enough to offer something to the original requester-person.
In other words, it seems my Interpreter is a bit lazy and won't put information into human formats unless it's necessary
In short I think we get what we need.
Betson
Every time I stumble through a response like this, I think of how naturally and evenly Bruce reports his experiences and wish I could do a better job of it.