the wheel of time - What's the point of this creepy scene in The Great Hunt?

In Chapter 10 of book 2 (tGH), there's this really weird scene where Rand goes into a house in a village and the scene changes every time he blinks. It flickers back and forth between the following scene:

A smiling, bald-headed man in rough clothes laid a slice of meat on a plate held by a woman with a worn face. She was smiling, too, though. She added peas and turnips to the plate and passed it to one of the children lining the table. There were half a dozen children, boys and girls, from nearly grown down to barely tall enough to look over the table. The woman said something, and the girl taking the plate from her laughed. The man started to cut another slice.

Suddenly another girl screamed, pointing at the door to the street. The man dropped the carving knife and whirled, then he screamed, too, face tight with horror, and snatched up a child. The woman grabbed another, and motioned desperately to the others, her mouth working frantically, silently. They all scrabbled toward a door in the back of the room.

That door burst open, and-

Blink.

... and a scene where the room is freezing cold, full of congealed food, and crawling with flies. After this happens several times, Rand does something that sounds very much like channeling saidin (though he doesn't know much about it at this time), and finds the room empty with only six dead flies in it.

What does this scene portend, if anything? I've got as far as book 10 and haven't really found anything at all like this - the closest thing is So Habor. Does it link up to anything later on (or earlier on that I missed)? By the Chekhov's gun principle, it should, but in a series as long and intricate as WoT, I could easily imagine this principle being violated by accident! (It's incredibly violated in Jack Vance's Lyonesse books, which are much less complicated.)

Thanks in advance for any answers!

Answer

As confirmed by Robert Jordan, Padan Fain indeed set up the time loop to trap Rand forever:

Question: Another interesting question was about the scene with all the flies in the house in book two.

Robert Jordan: This scene where Rand sees the same thing over and over again was actually Fain's doing, a trap devised by him to put Rand in a time loop forever.