[l008com]

I know how to make a dashed line in Illustrator, and I know how to nudge the dashes along the line in a direction. What I need are lines that will automatically align thier dashes so they don't overlap, even when 3 or 4 lines are overlapping. And manually offsetting the lines won't work, since there are too many lines in this work and they overlap ad several different places. Is there a way to do something like this?

Here is a sample of what I'm working on/talking about...

[kaboom]

There is no way to automatically do what you want, however I may have a workaround (though it might be too much work for you to do.)

Where the lines overlap, cut the topmost line where the overlap starts and ends. You will have a line that is just the overlap.
Now stroke that line that you just cut with both overlapping strokes. I'm assuming that you have Illus. 10 because earlier versions don't let you apply multiple fill/strokes to one item. From there just nudge the dashes so that they do not overlap anymore.

Not the ideal solution but a workaround nonetheless.