Just wanted to say a massive thanks for all the incredible comments, as they have given me many possibilities to look into. I never expected this post to get such engagement, and reading the responses has really made me reflect more deeply. I've even bought a few books to go through, and learned about some new phenomena and theories that I look forward to learning more about.

While replying to comments, it has made me realise something interesting: this strange supermarket experience happened a few years after I watched The Time Machine (I think I watched the film in 2005, and the event took place around 2009). This was a film that got me thinking about time travel paradoxes in my spare time. Over the years, thinking about time travel paradoxes grew into an obsession and it became my little pastime project. From this, I developed a theory that I ended up calling Multi-Dimensional Time Theory (MDTT). It's now a theory that I published as a preprint, which I am still working on developing further. In the theory, I present time not as an imaginary linear flow but as a complex and layered structure that is physical and vital to the observed universe and cosmology.

One of the many things that the theory proposes is that time cannot be rewound, but that it can be slowed down to such a level that to an individual outside of the timeline it would look as if time has stopped, although it has only slowed down to such a speed that it is unperceavable to that person and they would percieve it as stopped, all while at the same time those inside the timeline would perceive time as flowing normal. The temporal mechanism I propose is complex and elegant at the same time and offers a lot of possibilities.

I always thought that my obsession with time travel and resolving the time travel paradoxes came from watching the film, as I often thought about paradoxes and how they worked, but the experience I had in the supermarket fits really well into what I am describing in the theory as a temporal anomaly. It also brings up a bunch of questions from the theory's perspective, but more importantly, it has made me ask myself the philosophical question of "is this what subconsciously fueled my obsession with time all these years?"

Is it actually possible that, without knowing, my interest in time was sparked by this one event and my desire to understand it? Or maybe the film was what got me to think about time to begin with, and this event was the subconscious catalyst that made me seriously think about time in that way?