I'm sorry if this would be considered reviving an old thread, but I wanted to make a reply, and I don't know where better to make said reply than the thread in which the original comment was made. If there is a better place to reply, please let me know and I'll post it there instead.
I just wanted to comment on the "repeated scarf" scenes. I think the scenes you are talking about occur as Rand and Mat travel from Whitebridge to Caemlyn.
The way I read it, I always assumed it was an in medias res scene. Rand and Mat are traveling, Mat already has the scarf around his eyes because he was blinded by the lightning, and Rand is sick from channeling the One Source. We, the readers don't know all this because it hasn't been explained to us. Rand thinks back to what has happened in the past few days, and then we read the account to discover what has happened up to that point.
This type of storytelling used to be a lot more common. Apparently it has become so much less common that it isn't easily recognized, and is a source of confusion.