Vortices, turbulence, and rogue waves are typical phenomena of fluid dynamics. They can all be found, however, in simple models of lasers with optical injection. Almost 40 years ago we introduced a model of laser oscillations where, unexpectedly, conservative and dissipative dynamics coexist in the same phase space. When these laser models are extended to partial differential equations to include diffraction or dispersion, the underlying wave dynamics leads first to Turing patterns and then to regimes of defect-mediated turbulence where creation and annihilation of 2D vortices produce psychedelic spiral structures. In these regimes of spatio-temporal disorder, we observe the appearance of rogue waves corresponding to rare events, enormous peaks of light and heavily non-Gaussian probability density functions.