I just want to search the index and get information out of it without going to the database. The objects I use can be very large so it is much better to figure out the exact instance I need to retrieve before going to the database. Projections are not ideal because they return object[] ideally hibernate search would return un-managed instance objects with all available information filled in. I am coming from compass search which is a dead project now but that was the default behavior and worked quite well.

Please advise if there is anyway to achieve this behavior.

it could be done, but generally I see some problems with it:
- the API should make it very clear that these are unmanaged and detached entities:
* they are out of transactions
* navigating lazy loaded properties is not going to work
* changes made to these objects will not be synchronised back to the index nor to the database
- we only store in the index the minimal set of fields required, as mapped explicitly by the user
* we won't be able to load any field not mapped as @Field & Stored.YES
* Making extended use of Stored.YES is not to be advised: it bloats the index making it larger than needed and slower
- extracting fields from Stored fields is performance intensive: usually a database can do better than that, especially with 2nd level cache

I would advise to make a constructor for your entities which takes the Object[] returned from a projection: that is not too different than what we would have to do, but at least you do it explicitly and are aware of the limitations.
I suspect that you could address them better than with a general purpose solution, but you're very welcome to provide suggestions.

Usually what people do on very performance sensitive areas is to use combine it with a 2nd level cache: nothing beats the performance of a map lookup;
you can combine fulltext queries with 2nd level cache interaction by using ObjectLookupMethod as described in chapter:
5.1.3.6. Customizing object initialization strategies

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/search/4.2/reference/en-US/html_single/

Please le me know how it goes, it would be interesting to explore new strategies if needed.