get only one record from a same date records in the collection Laravel

Is there a way I could only retrieved only one record from a same date records in the collection?

My records goes like this,

id | date       | event_name   | type
----------------------------------------
1  | 2016-01-23 | event 1      | event 1
2  | 2016-01-23 | event 1      | event 2
3  | 2016-03-15 | event 2      | event 1
4  | 2016-03-15 | event 2      | event 2

so as you can see, there are records with same date and I want to fetch only one on that same date records, so I expect to get,

2016-01-23, event 1
2016-03-15, event 2

I tried,

$events = events::select( events.*',
            DB::raw('(select date from events where date = events.date) as events'))
            ->get();

but unfortunately its not working like it gives me an empty array from

dd(var_dump($events->toArray()));

any ideas, help please?

via Chebli Mohamed