Turns out it was a collision between Laravel and PW sessions. Once I removed the Laravel Session provider and alias in /laravel/app/config/app.php it worked great.
I also removed the Auth provider and alias. Not sure if that is also needed to be removed with Session. I didn't test enough to determine that. If the above alone doesn't work, then also remove the Auth and it should work.
Here's everything I commented out to get it to work:
//'Illuminate\Auth\AuthServiceProvider',
//'Illuminate\Session\CommandsServiceProvider',
//'Auth' => 'Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth',
//'Session' => 'Illuminate\Support\Facades\Session',
There's also this:
'Illuminate\Session\SessionServiceProvider',
But commenting that out caused Laraval to crash in wanting session help.
